I'm doing just that since a few years ago, but of course, with Winrar. Multi-volume solid archives of 4 GB, with a 256 MB dictionary size. A neat feature of Winrar is the "RarFiles.lst" (File order list for solid archiving), so I put md5 checksums, registry and config files, manuals or pdf guides, and stuff like that, at the archive's beginning, thus allowing me to extract them much faster, without processing the whole archive.

I've stopped using 7-zip for archiving like a decade ago. I found it to be about 3 times slower (packing and unpacking) than winrar, for just a bit better compression, and, in my opinion, that's not worth it, especially when doing archives bigger than 10 GB. Nowadays I'm using 7-zip just to unpack Nullsoft installers - it does a better job than Universal Extractor.

It depends on the settings you use. You can specify very fast compression or very slow and through compression. The GUI has dropdown boxes and the CLI it's -mx1 to -mx9, plus other settings. I'm finding fastest to be useful in cases, but for the best compression i take the slower speed because i'm probably not doing it again and the space savings can be double.

I suppose that's why gzip/zlib is still so popular, it's naturally mixed between decent speed and okay-ish compression even after you have gigabytes to do dictionary and lookups. Actually you'll probably get 80% of the compression on the fastest setting of any compressor, after which it takes a lot more effort to get a few more percent.

Yup, ofc, I should have mentioned I was going for best compression with LZMA2.

Don't be surprised to get 10% better compression it works 10x harder. PPM is suppose to be better than LZMA for text matching, but even slower.

Oh well. But it is said 7z is bad for linux since it doesn't keep track of permissions/user data or any of that, so exact backups isn't working but if you don't care about permissions (like books, games, music, movies, etc) then it's fine.

7z may not support UNIX permissions (haven't verified this myself), but tar certainly does, and there's nothing preventing you from making a .tar.7z file.

Then again, xz, which uses LZMA, is also an option, and GNU tar even supports decompressing and unpacking .tar.xz files with a single command, which is quite handy. .tar.xz is widely used in the Linux world these days; even the upstrem Linux kernel source found at kernel.org uses this file format.

(Note that, since tar supports permissions, .xz doesn't need to have that support for .tar.xz files to store permissions.)

What's up with the undead plague latealy?

Call a cleric, please!


Seriosuly though: can't we auto-lock a thread after a month or two of inactivity?

Well, that would require something resembling automation, and we can't even require a simple verified purchase to access the forums.

From what i see 7z file structure is closer to zip, but with unicode support.

XZ in that case is just the compressor as a stream, nothing else. Basically Gzip that uses zlib. But in that way XZ is far more versitile than 7z when you pipe information.

But i was mostly saying not to rely on 7z to backup your linux system, you may get the files but any protections or setup will be stripped out.

Curiously 7z supports uncompressing SquashFS files, so you could archive with all the advantages of LZMA, mountability and file deduplication that way.

Yeah, WinRAR is probably a better bet with large files. 7-Zip is cheaper though and I've really grown to like it over many years.

While slow at zipping, I have found 7-Zip quite fast at unzipping. That's just going with default compression, as used in the following program, which I have just finished.

https://github.com/Twombs/Steam-Games-List

Well, some things do come back from the dead and have an extended life.

While I am certainly not in favor of necroing most of the time, it always depends on merit for me. Some things should obviously not be brought back. But some topics have a bit more life in them yet, and no sense giving more return results in future searches. Keep it all together is my motto, unless there is likely to be some negative impact ... old software, outdated info, etc.

There are two strategies for ongoing conversations (on a discussion forum) and both, neither and each are superior depending on the circumstances. The first strategy is keep an original thread ongoing, updating after however long to add value; the second strategy is to create a new topic every time someone has a similar idea.

The advantage of resurrecting old threads is that the entire collection of contributions from each contributor are accessible in the one conversation linked list; the disadvantage is that the earlier contributions may not be as relevant when the latter contributions are made. (This keeps a useful registry of progress through the topic's lifespan, though.)

But you could also make the point that contributors from long ago are not likely to still be around to make replies or add new content, too. :)

I actually prefer the first strategy, if only because knee-jerk insta-answering does not facilitate Kahneman (2011) slow thinking (of which I am a big fan) and I like to see how the topic has progressed over time, too.

Also, if there are multiple conversations there will be a lot of repetition, and less frequent contributors might not penetrate all the threads. Personally, I hate having to locate a lost factoid or conversation that I can recall but not grasp, —— since its location is lost in the webs of the internet, smothered by endless inane babbling about ephemera, like which pop star is shipping with whom —— and if one contributes to multiple conversations* it is geometrically complex to keep track of all the conversations.

edit: expanded with footnote

________
* Jacques Derrida (1967), il n'y a pas de hors-texte [“there is nothing outside context”]; people will inevitably contribute to many different conversations, depending on their context.

+1. Thanks scientiae. Great post!
My two cents: The GOG community gives undeserved priority to "necro posting" thanks to this archaic (and broken?) forum content management system GOG has.
Think about it: If we would have the hability to sort the threads by Last update, subject, replies & created date PLUS a real usable search feature (the current one only ,,allows 1 word! and limits the results to 3 pages of -who the heck knows the sorting criteria applied- results,,)
Without those limitations, my guess is we would not have this "necro questioning" conversation...