add compression

At the moment we do not plan to include any compression. BiT uses
incremental backups by hardlinking all unchanged files. Compression will
break the hardlinks resulting in an enormous increase of space consumption
instead of a decrease.
We might introduce compression for filesystems that do not support hardlinks
(FAT32), however these filesystems lose interest...

If we discover a compression method that is incremental and easy to
implement (the tar incremental method for example is too complex) we will
certainly investigate the possibility, so if you know one...

2009/11/6 WoWE <email address hidden>

> New question #88837 on Back In Time:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/backintime/+question/88837
>
> Will there be the possibility of compression of backups?
>
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> contact for Back In Time.
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No, unfortunately I do not know. But the opportunity to make backups with compression would be just fine. Maybe I do not quite understand the complexity of such an implementation, but why can not compress, for example, each file separately in the backup process? Thank you for your informative and quick response.

1. One of the goals of BIT if to be able to open files (in read-only mode) from snapshots. Most applications allow you to open files from the file system but not from an archive.
2. If we compress each snapshot in one archive we will loose hard-link feature. You don't change many files between snapshots hard-links can be more disk efficient than archives.
3. If we make a big archive with all snapshots inside we will have a huge archive (and maybe too slow to be useful).