I know this topic has been discussed to death and I did find alot of good threads about it but the thing that is still a question is compression levels when backing up.

I use Norton Ghost 2003 for my other types of backup, but the compression levels with .mp3 and .flac files is almost 1:1 ratio. I am even usng the highest compression level command line -Z9 and still 1:1. I currently have 100GB of flac files soon to be 250 (in 2 months or so).

There has got to be an app or method for better compression levels!
Any ideas or is everyone having to double there HD size just to backup?

LOL :-)

An audio file is already compressed, with an audio optimised algorithm, so if it was possible to compress more, it has been integred into algorithm of audio codec

Windmiller,

You are asking Ghost to compress files that are already compressed.

If Ghost was able to give audio files better compression than the current formats/methods we would have no need for MP3 and FLAC. We would all be storing our tunes in some kind of "ghost" audio format...

When I back up my PC I tend to tell Ghost to ignore compression on folders containing any form of compressed files like zip files, rar files, jpegs, mp3, flac, ape etc etc. The amount of processor time and work just doesnt justify the very poor compression ratio.

I hope this clarifies the situation.

BrummieMarc

robert - LOL indeed!!!

®om - you beat me to it!!!

M

No, really, can't you just keep re-compressing the files until you get them all down to one byte each?

that is an exelent idea!

Thanks for the clarification! It makes sense but I had assumed that there was some way to further compress them.

Edit: removed redundant answer...

WinRAR used to offer some "multimedia" compression algorithm, but i never had any look with it ... and it is no longer avail afaik

mathemtically and theoretically yes.
the problem is, of course, that the decoder would have become very large. approximately as large as the original data that was compressed.

He talk about lossless codecs

If you would like to read further and understand why Ghost can't compress your (already compressed) MP3s, I suggest you read some of these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_compression
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
Huffman coding is the last step in the process of MP3 compression. It does a good job at removing all remaining redundency from the file and makes it impossible to compress it further (in general).

And, of course, it would have to be a different decoder for each compressed file, and there would be a global limit of 256 possible compressed files. Other than that, it would work fine.

Thanks for all the replies.

interesting info Cabbagerat!

So all of you out there with 150-200GB of .Flac files are having to purchase an additional 150-300GB worth of HD space just to backup?

Looks like I am going to be watching Fatwallet like a hawk! Seems like alot of money to backup.

How are you planning on backing up your files? You're going to need to put them on a physically seperate drive, at the very least, and backing up to some sort of external media is suggested. Backup tapes or a USB2 HDD are probably your best option for this sort of thing.

alereon,

I currently have 2 X 160GB HD in a HTPC and a 80GB that I am going to put in a external enclosure once it gets here next week.

For now I am backing up to the second 160GB HD. I think I am going to wait until the 1st 160 fills up and then see what I can get. Maybe a 250GB maxtor. So...

1x160GB samsung = Flac Files
1x160GB maxtor = Flac + divx
1x80GB maxtor =external for archiving digital photots,documents, OS

To my knowledge, the span life of a HDD isn't that great...

Actually the multimedia algorithm is still used, but WinRAR now decides on its own when to use it.

Edit:

From the changelog:

... have a look -> barf

... but don't miss to read the disclaimer

I've got:

1 X 160 GB for flac (one file/track)
1 X 160 GB for wav images (one file/album)

Currently I've got about 350 CDs and they use up about 80 GB on the flac volume and 125 GB on the wav volume. My strategy is to continue down the road I'm on until I fill up the wav volume (n.b. both drives have the same info, just in different format), and then I'll start flacing the wav images and rolling them off onto DVD.

I figure I can get somewhere in excess of 10 CD images per DVD once they are flaced, so that means that with my current setup I can get to about 700 CDs with 2 X 160 GB hard drives and 35 DVDs and have complete redundancy.