compressing a tar.gz into something smaller

I backed up a wordpress install that I'm working on. It's around 65Gig. Is there a way to compress a tar.gz file to something even smaller? The reason it's so big is that it has ton of videos in the source code.

Here is the ls -lh

-rw-------  1 odyssey odyssey  65G Feb 29 14:00 backup-2.29.2016_12-49-50_odyssey.tar.gz

unixmiah

Posted 2016-03-01T17:32:40.817

Reputation: 121

3Provided the videos are already compressed, you won’t be able the reduce the size much more. – Daniel B – 2016-03-01T17:34:58.930

1What sort of compression do you expect? Simplest solution, don't backup the videos, in the same archive as the database/source – Ramhound – 2016-03-01T17:35:45.347

videos should be much, much smaller, unless it is for LAN use only – Olivier Dulac – 2016-03-02T12:18:17.340

Answers

So compressing the tar.gz itself probably isn't going to be much help, since you're trying to recompress already compressed data :)

There are other tools you can use that provide better compression ratios than gzip, but at a cost of (sometimes ludicrously) increased compression/decompression time.

Someone over on AskUbuntu already put together a phenomenal answer as to exact numbers on what the better compression methods are, but you couldn't go wrong by trying p7zip (available from most package managers)

Remember though that video files in most cases are already compressed, so the gains by using a much better algorithm probably won't be great.

Mikey T.K.

Posted 2016-03-01T17:32:40.817

Reputation: 3 224