# Add option to disable backup compression

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/add-option-to-disable-backup-compression/37288>\
**Category:** Feature\
**Created:** [December 30, 2015, 10:43pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/add-option-to-disable-backup-compression/37288 "2015-12-30T22:43:36Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 1

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**Author:** ![Koinu](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/koinu/32/120781_2.png) [@Koinu](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Koinu)\
**Post date:** [December 30, 2015, 10:43pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/add-option-to-disable-backup-compression/37288/1 "2015-12-30T22:43:36Z")

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The built-in backup functionality is great, but It’d be nice if there was an option to disable compression and produce plain .tar files.

Specifically, if the backups were uncompressed, rolling hash-based chunking (intra and inter-file deduplication) done by backup software such as [Borg](https://github.com/borgbackup/borg) could kick in more effectively and avoid repeatedly uploading/storing unchanging parts of the backup (i.e., uploads).

(I’m backing up /var/discourse in its entirety to keep the disaster recovery steps as simple as possible, while still keeping Discourse’s own tarball-based backups enabled as a fallback in case Postgres fails to recover from a potentially-inconsistent state. I’d just like those tarballs to be less costly to back up.)

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/add-option-to-disable-backup-compression/37288)._