I was wondering if there is any general consensus as to how large to make the recovery record in a WinRAR archive?

For instance, I have been backing up my albums with Monkey's and then WinRARing the ape file. I want to use a recovery record to (hopefully) avoid any lost files due to CDR damage. Should I just use the 1 percent that it comes at? I've done a few albums already and increased the recovery record to 5%. Just wanna know what you guys thing.

Also, should I be compressing with WinRAR, or just add the file without compressing it more? And, should I make it a solid archive?

Just some random thoughts I had, and thought I should do it right if I'm gonna bother to be spending the time to backup my cd's.

the bigger you make it the more damage it can recover from, it's up to you. I've never used anything but the default 1% myself, and on the very rare occasions where I've had a cd go partially bad and have had to use the recovery record it was enough. All depends on how much damage you anticipate there being.

There probably isn't much point in actually compressing the data, as it's going to be pretty rare to get any more savings on an ape file than you've already got from the audio compression.

Solid archives only help out when you're compressing a lot of similar-content files (such as many source code files for a program you're writing) in your archive. What this option does is group all files that have the same file extension and compress that group of files as if it were one large file, kind of like using 'tar' first and then compressing the .tar file, but without requiring the extra step(s). So an archive with 50 .txt files, 15 .exe files, and 20 .wav files would sort of be compressed as if it were only 3 files, 1 big .txt file, 1 big .exe file, and 1 big .wav file, as far as the compression engine were concerned. It can give you substantially smaller archives in a lot of instances and is usually best to be left on all the time. You don't need to use that in your case, it won't benefit you since you'll likely only be 'storing' the ape files rather than compressing. Also, if you do make a solid archive it can make 'decompression' take a lot longer than necessary if you're only 'decompressing' a handful of files scattered throughout the archive. If you make a solid archive then it still has to 'decompress' every file in the archive before the one that you actually want, so it might have to skip 50 files before you get to the one you're after. Doesn't matter much in your specific case anyways since you won't be using it, but in other cases it is a consideration. Usually better compression would win out over having to wait a few extra seconds during decompression and you would choose to leave 'solid' turned on, but that would depend on the situation.

<edit> so if you didn't make a solid archive and wanted a handful of files scattered throughout the archive it would skip the unwanted files pretty much instantly, rather than having to decompress them to get to the ones you wanted. If you're decompressing every file in the archive speed is no different in either solid/non-solid case.

Thanks for the indepth response

just some example data from winrar 3.0 (4096KB dictionary, best compression)

27,421,046 bytes - linux-2.4.20.tar.bz2 original file downloaded
32,640,567 bytes - linux-2.4.20-not-solid.rar
24,186,198 bytes - linux-2.4.20-solid.rar