How do you backup your downloaded ROMs? (lemmy.one)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by hellisfulloftacos@lemmy.one to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

23 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I use emulators that play directly from (.iso) or (.img) files, however as you probably know, most ROMs are downloaded as archives.

Do you backup your ROMs in their downloaded archived format? Or as uncompressed files?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] zedricxks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago

what programs do you use for the tar and then zst? do you happen to have a guide?

[-] AnEilifintChorcra@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago

Just tar and zstd. They're probably installed by default for most distros anyway.

I think this is what I used when I first tried out zstd https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-and-use-zstd-compression-tool-on-linux

Tar supports input from zstd so I put everything on one line.

tar -I 'zstd -v --ultra -22' -cvf YourFile.tar.zst -C /path/to/your/file YourFile

-I takes the input from zstd which is in quotes.

--ultra it should be redundant but for some reason its needed for higher levels of compression.

-22 the highest level of compression offered by zstd.

-c for compress.

-v for verbose.

-f for the file name.

-C excludes the absolute path to the file/directory and just takes YourFile as the file/directory to compress. Its not needed if you're in the same directory as YourFile.

I would recommend leaving out

--ultra -22

and just test how much compression you get with the default level first because 22 is super slow and if it just can't compress the file you won't see any difference in file size compared to the default compression level.