User selectable added error recovery info, and compression

[mlts22]

This would take some coding, but it would be nice to see an option to add an error recovery record, as a percentage of the data written. This would greatly help with error-prone media like DVDs where one glitch means that a number of files are pretty much irretrivably lost unless I make multiple copies of the same backup set. For example, adding 10-20% error recovery info would allow 1-2 DVDs to fail on a 10 DVD backup, but yet still allow for 100% restoration of the files.

 

Of course, one can turn this functionality off or lower when dealing with more reliable media (tape, hard disks, etc.)

 

User selectable compression would be nice too. Its understandable that Retrospect's compression has to be a balance between speed and space mainly because a number of backup devices require a constant data stream or else they will have problems ("shoe-shining" on tapes, buffer underruns on CDs/DVDs.) However, for D2D2T or D2D2DVD where the media is more tolerant for data underruns, it would be nice to offer a higher compression algorithm like bzip2.