> How good is the Archive Manager built into jaunty in
> terms of its comparison to say Winzip?
It's equivalent. Archive Manager is essentially a front-end to a bunch of
file compressors. bzip2 will give you plenty good enough compression.
> I'm thinking more security than
> compression though the better the compression the happier I am
You can add passwords, if that's your thing. But something like gpg would
probably do a better job.
> What I'm trying to do is backup about 150Gb of stuff on my NAS to an
> external HDD.
Is your NAS the machine running Jaunty? If not, what you're trying to do
will only slow things down.
> Copying the data from one drive to another is quite slow
The fastest way to do things is to get the source and target drives close
together (in bus terms) - usually on the same southbridge if you're using
PC-type architectures. Note that sharing a single PATA bus is a mistake,
though - the bandwidth has to be shared between both drives.
> So what I want is to compress the data (saving copying time) and
> encrypt is at the same time.
That is only going to work if you compress on the NAS; using an external
machine means you have to run all the uncompressed data off the NAS, then
run the compressed data back on. That would be a mistake.
> And before anyone suggests I could speed this up - I'm constrained in that
> my NAS is quite old and most of my network "infrastructure" is only 10Mb
> so at best I'm getting about 780kBps transfer speeds.
You might find it easier & quicker to move the HDD(s) out of the NAS.
> Anyone been in this situation and found a sort of "Winzip" for Ubuntu that
> goes a bit beyond Archive manager?
I've used luks for that sort of thing before - I once mounted an encrypted
file on a machine in Chicago onto my laptop on the Isle of Wight ferry,
with encrypted communications all the way. But I was very bored that
day...
