I personally back up about a terabyte each week, and I use 7-zip because it has built-in encryption, which is required because of the HR data in the backup. Thank heavens for xargs -P.
I could use "openssl enc" combined with any pure compression utility, but I don't want to make decompression impossible if I get hit by a bus.
I have replaced all my previous uses of xz with lzip ever since I read that page (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32210438), but for some reason lzip never seem to rise to the same level of fame as xz. bzip3 also wasn't benchmarked against lzip.
I think you should just skip both xz and lzip, because that essay is in my opinion technically correct but also only deals with a very much minor concern [1]. If you want the recovery out of archives, you should use dedicated formats like PArchive and not ordinary archives with half-baked recovery attempts.
For my personal backup use, I actually use RAR with recovery records, optionally with encryption if it's sensitive. I was only using xz in places where I couldn't use RAR (e.g. for work), and those places tend to also have lzip available.
https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html
I personally back up about a terabyte each week, and I use 7-zip because it has built-in encryption, which is required because of the HR data in the backup. Thank heavens for xargs -P.
I could use "openssl enc" combined with any pure compression utility, but I don't want to make decompression impossible if I get hit by a bus.