Compress a directory

[Nutter]

I have a hard drive on my desktop computer (Win2k) that is pretty much dedicated to digital photography. Every hour my Mandrake file server runs an rsync to sync that drive with a folder on the file server.

But the drive on my desktop is larger than the drive on my file server, so the time may come when the file server can't hold everything it needs. Is there a way to compress the destination directory on the file server so that it doesn't take up as much space? I rarely need to open files from the file server unless the primary drive dies, so speed isn't critical. But, I also don't want to compress the entire file server drive because I do occasionally use it, and it's pretty old so I don't want to slow it down any more than I have to :-)

[encyclo]

What kind of files are you storing on your drive? RAW files or JPGs. Obviously, if it the latter compression would be limited in that JPGs are already compressed files. Also, have you tried something simple such as a cron job to make a .tar.bz2 of everything?

[Nutter]

The images are about half jpg, half raw. But I have other files on there as well.

I haven't tried zipping it, but wouldn't I have to unzip it before every update and rezip afterwards? I was hoping there was an easy way to tag a directory as 'compressed' and the file system took care of it :-)