Archiving and Compression Tools for MPE/iX

(circa 2000)

Since HP now bundles STORE-to-disc with MPE (although you still have to buy TurboSTORE to use compression), we very highly recommend STORE-to- disc for all MPE-to- MPE bundles, tar+gzip for MPE-to-Unix, tar+gzip for MPE-to-Windows (if you can convince the Windows users to use something like DragNZip, which understands tar and gzip formats), or PKZIP/iX if you want to distribute files to unknown Windows users.

(Please send additions/correction/suggestions to support@allegro.com.)

Tool Name	Availability	Platforms	Preserves MPE file attributes	Preserves MPE groups/accounts	Upload flexibility	Relative compression	Compression speed
LZW	Freeware	MPE,Unix,PC,Mac,others	Yes	Yes	Best	3	Best
MOVER	Bundled	MPE	Yes	Yes	Inflexible	4	(not rated)
PKZIP/iX	Freeware	MPE,PC	No	No	(unknown)	(not rated)	(not rated)
tar + compress (-cvfz)	Freeware	MPE,Unix,PC	Yes	Yes	Inflexible	2	(not rated)
tar + gzip	Freeware	MPE,Unix,PC	Yes	Yes	Inflexible	1 (Best)	Worst
Backup+ from ORBiT	$Commercial$	MPE,HP-UX	Yes	Yes	(unknown)	(not rated)	(not rated)
Quark+ from Quest Software	$Commercial$	MPE	Yes	Yes	(unknown)	(not rated)	(not rated)
HP's TurboSTORE store-to-disk	Bundled	MPE	Yes	Yes	(unknown)	(not rated)	(not rated)
TurboSTORE store-to-disk ;compress=high	$Commercial$	MPE	Yes	Yes	(unknown)	(not rated)	(not rated)
TurboSTORE store-to-disk +compress (-cvfz)	Bundled	MPE	Yes	Yes	(unknown)	(not rated)	(not rated)
TurboSTORE store-to-disk +gzip	Bundled	MPE	Yes	Yes	(unknown)	(not rated)	(not rated)

Notes:

1. "Preserves MPE file attributes": "tar" doesn't support NM KSAM files or IMAGE databases.
2. "Upload flexibility": LZW can read archives that are fixed or variable, any record size, with or without the right filecode.
3. "Relative compression": we compressed a set of files with each tool, and ranked the results.
4. "tar" doesn't do compression, so we combined it with the POSIX "compress" and GNU "gzip".
5. "Quark+" has not been tested -- based on marketing literature.

Tool Name	Elapsed Time	CPU Time	# Bytes
tar & gzip	11.311	5.32	267611
tar & compress	7.913	3.54	370361
tar (z option)	7.022	3.21	370688
LZW	2.624	1.15	388096
MOVER_539	2.077	0.80	692407
tar	2.017	0.75	882176