Archiving and Compression Tools for MPE/iX

(circa 2000)

Since HP now bundles STORE-to-Disk with MPE (although you still have to buy TurboSTORE to use compression), we very highly recommend STORE-to-Disk 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.
Some data, from packaging the RAMUSAGE files:

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