Ryan: That was a bad example to give you, and I DID use public encryption given what was in the file to give it a little greater protection. But because it contains all binary files, you don't get much from compression anyway. I must hasten to add for the files that are in the Quarantine folder that I always add a ".ck" extension for files I THINK are bad (after analysis), and a ".BAD" extension if my decision has been confirmed by at least one AntiVirus company. By extension changes I mean:
PotentiallyBad.cab -> PotentiallyBad.cab.ck ReallyBad.exe -> ReallyBad.exe.BAD But since I had to change the order of compression on my key to put bzip2 first, to me it was manual. Frequently I use just symmetric encryption with the "-a" flag in a script. I had some problems doing it without the flag (can't remember what it was) so I left the script that way. I should probably modify the script to give a choice. Depending on how big the file is, I may or may not use the script. Usually I am in such a hurry I end up using the script. I did a short test using symmetric encryption (AES), and my key set to do NO compression (my default, and it should have nothing to do with symmetric encryption). Here are the results of the test (you should be able to deduce what the other files are from the comments): 1154945 Hosts.tar.bz2.gpg bzipped, then encrypted 1157556 Hosts.tar.bz2 1390758 Hosts.tar.gz.gpg 1390807 Hosts.tar.gz 1390856 Hosts.tar.zip.gpg 1390929 Hosts.tar.zip 1407485 Hosts.tar.gpg encrypted ONLY 1407732 Hosts.tar.gpg.gz 1407858 Hosts.tar.gpg.zip 1414045 Hosts.tar.gpg.bz2 encrypted, then bzipped 6400000 Hosts.tar -------------------------- (using "-a" option) 1906066 Hosts.tar.asc 1446067 Hosts.tar.asc.bz2 If you aren't using the "-a" option, you should NOT attempt to compress it after you have encrypted it because it just makes the file size LARGER! This is altered if you do an --armor as you noted, and my scripts are set to do "-a" encryption right now. Since the size difference was only marginally larger for the *.asc file I figured I would just bzip2 the file after it was encrypted. When I am in a hurry it is easier to use script and then bzip2, but it is NOT the smallest file. That file is the one that bzipped, and then encrypted without the "-a" option. Encryption does some compression. It reduced the size of all the compressed files, and the size of the TAR file considerably whether you use "-a" option or not. HHH _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
