On Monday, 27 September 2021 02:39:19 BST Adam Carter wrote: > On Sun, Sep 26, 2021 at 8:57 PM Peter Humphrey <pe...@prh.myzen.co.uk> > > wrote: > > Hello list, > > > > I have an external USB-3 drive with various system backups. There are 350 > > .tar files (not .tar.gz etc.), amounting to 2.5TB. I was sure I wouldn't > > need to compress them, so I didn't, but now I think I'm going to have to. > > Is there a reasonably efficient way to do this? > > find <mountpoint> -name \*tar -exec zstd -TN {} \; > > Where N is the number of cores you want to allocate. zstd -T0 (or just > zstdmt) if you want to use all the available cores. I use zstd for > everything now as it's as good as or better than all the others in the > general case. > > Parallel means it uses more than one core, so on a modern machine it is > much faster.
Thanks to all who've helped. I can't avoid feeling, though, that the main bottleneck has been missed: that I have to read and write on a USB-3 drive. It's just taken 23 minutes to copy the current system backup from USB-3 to SATA SSD: 108GB in 8 .tar files. Perhaps I have things out of proportion. -- Regards, Peter.