Compressing hippos really fast

[Buchbinder, Barry (NIH/NIAID) [E]]

Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> does anybody know about a compression tool which is above all
> capable of compressing really fast?

I know that this is very "un-Linuxy", but if you don't really
need tar, you might consider zip.

The -u (update) option will only compress changed files.  The
rest of the time, is devoted to coping the already compressed
part of the zip and doing the date comparisons.  (One might
let find do the latter.)

And to adopt a previously suggestion, the -n option will just
store (no compression) files with certain suffixes.

In my experience, zip -u doesn't seem particularly fast
(though that is with cygwin over a busy LAN on busy servers),
but it might be worth an experiment.  (And be prepared for
the initial creation of the zip archives being slow.)

Good luck.

- Barry