When weighting the results based only on the resulted compressed file and processing time, rzip takes bzip by far. It has superior compressing abilities and rzip does it two times faster than bzip.

One must note that rzip was much more memory intensive, so it isn’t suited for environments which are low on available memory. Another disadvantage of rzip is that it can’t operate on stdin/stdout, so one must first physically create the file on the disk before compressing it.

As I don’t have any memory shortage on my machine (especially during the night when I make my backups), and I can live with creating a temporary tar file, I plan to switch over my backup script to use rzip. The new script will probably work very similar to the current one except it will produce a rzip compressed archive, which will help me cut down the costs of backups.