[sllug-members]: Encrypted backup tapes

[Andrew GIlmore]

On Wed, 2007-01-10 at 10:02 -0700, Lamont Peterson wrote:

> Recently, I ran this on my notebook (/secure/ is an encrypted
> partition):
> 
> tar -cf - /secure/ | gzip -9 | gpg -c > /media/usb/backup/secure.tar.gz.gpg


My experience with a small tar file of text files files was that the
size of the tar file gzipped and then encrypted was the same size as the
tarfile just encrypted. At the time it made sense to me because the
encryption routine needs to get the highest entropy possible, and
encrypting plain text starts with low entropy.

Does this hold true for larger files?

Andrew