Format of compressed old access log files changing to bzip2

When we store older Apache Web server access logs for your site — those that are more than two months old — we re-compress the original logs into single monthly files. These take up less disk space for your account when you have a lot of them. (We have some customers with log files going back more than ten years!)

Until now, we’ve re-compressed these files using gzip compression. However, we’re going to switch to a different modern compression format, bzip2 compression, which reduces the size even more. The resulting files are about half the size of gzip.

Almost all the free software tools that decompress gzip files can also decompress bzip2 files, and very few people use the older logs anyway, so this change shouldn’t cause any problems. Let us know if you have any questions, though.

By the way, this change only applies to log files more than 60 days old when they’re re-compressed. We aren’t currently changing the format for the original log files that are less than 60 days old. Those still use gzip.