What are the tradeoffs of the different compression algorithms?
The purpose is backup, transfer & restore. I don't care about popularity, as long as a mature enough tool exists for unix. I care about
the algorithms I am considering are
Tar is not a compression algorithm per se.
You may use zip/gzip when time for compression/decompression is the most important issue.
You may use bzip when you need a better compression rate.
You may use LZMA when even bigger compression rate needed, but CPU time bigger.
It would be very simple to create a simple testbed for those cases.
Write a script that uses each in turn on a set of files that is representative of those you wish to comporess, and measure the time/cpu/memory usage/compression ratio acheived.
Rerun them a statistically significant number of times, and you'll have your answer.
It usually depends on your input data but I've never found anything that gives me better general compression than 7zip (http://www.7-zip.org).