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.