I was running low on disk space on my computer so I started looking through all of the stuff I had in my home directory. Some of it was stuff that I saved as a backup a year or two ago and haven't looked at it since. There was some other stuff of which I had multiple copies. One directory I had was the data I kept from the laptop I used when I worked for Riverland Community College. I rearranged some of the data, deleted some useless stuff and moved some of it to other parts of the drive. I then made a tarball of the directory so I could keep all of the data that was left, but not take up so much space. While it was running I thought to myself, "It would be good if this actually compresses down to half the original size." Here is the result:
jeremiah@fluffy:~$ du -sh laptop* 370M laptop 50M laptop.tgz
About all I can say is, "Wow!"
Now if I get really ambitious, I can come up with an elaborate scheme to archive data to CD in an organized fashon. That way, I can keep the data that I don't use often on CD-ROM and not on the hard disk drive and keep my space available for downloading Linux install ISO's and stuff.