On Wed, 22 Mar 2017 10:31:16 +0100
Andreas Nastke <nastke AT gdp-group DOT com> wrote:

> how about archiving the 'tiny' items into larger tar- or zip-files
> on a regular basis (say every 15 minutes) and then only backup the
> archives.

The thing is that having "low-level addressing" data in a bootstrap
file allows Bacula to be blazing fast in positioning the tape to the
beginning of the required backup's data.

If the only thing you know the name of the file, you basically need
Bacula to read all the entries from the beginning of the volume one by
one until it finds the one with the matching name.  That's why it would
literally buy us nothing: we already have lists of files to supply
`bextract` via its "-i" command-line option.  Restoration in this case
takes several hours for an LTO-4 drive -- spent mostly in reading the
headers of the unwanted files and skipping past them.

IOW proper boostrap files serve like "indexes" to the tape's data.

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