Using bzip2 compression (and default sha1 checksum):
use original abk
mailboxes 387Mb 137Mb
home 505Mb 330Mb
total 892Mb 467Mb
compression ratio: 0.523
mailboxes: My mailboxes folder, several files in mbox format with varying
sizes (total about 350Mb), and the rest are older mailboxes already compressed
with bzip2.
home: My home directory, which comprises mostly of tons of small files; the
most important directory is my development one, with 229Mb and tons of source
code files, most of them small (way under 15k); and my pictures also take up
some space, 128Mb, mostly .jpg files (and thus not so compressable); the rest
is mostly configuration files and a little bit of documentation.
It took about 10 minutes to do a full backup, from scratch, on my P4 2.8Ghz,
HT enabled, 512Mb ram.