compression and encryption

[Michael Anckaert]

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On 22 Jan 2003 16:49:28 +0100
Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von Bidder <avbidder@fortytwo.ch> wrote:


> It won't cause any problems (apart from tar not being able to deal
> with it, but I guess you knew that). But it won't compress it:
> compression needs redundancy in the data - and redundancy in encrypted
> data basically means that the encryption algorithm is bad. And, as we
> all hope, gpg uses good encryption algorithms.
I sure hope so too. :-)
> 
> In other words: any data compression must come before encryption to
> gain anything. gpg usually compresses data anyway before encrypting
> it, so you could try how good you get without explicit compression.
I'm using bzip2 and think (correct me when wrong) that this is better
compression than the one gpg uses.
> 
> NOTE: this is of course only if you don't use ascii armored output.
> The ascii armored output can of course be compressed again, but I
> don't think it makes sense, better just use binary gpg output.
> 
So to put it simply:
	archive -> compress -> encrypt

-- 

Greetings,
Michael Anckaert
	aka The XanTor

Email:		xantor@linux.be
OpenPGP Key: 	0xC772D5C1
Jabber:		xantor@jabber.org

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