[gmueckl]

Your method is clearly flawed. Altering a single byte once is insufficient as a test unless you analyzed the structure of the compressed file first to see where the really important information is stored. It may well be that you just modified a verbatim string from the source data in the gzip case, but corrupted a bit of metadata about how the compressed data is structured in the bzip2 case. If you tried a different random bytes, the results might be reversed.

The proper test would be to iterate over every bit in the compressed file, flip it and try to recover. Then compute number of successful recoveries against the number of bits tested. Compression algorithms that perform similarly should gmhave similar likelyhoods that a single bit flip corrupts the entirety of the data.

[esaym]

I thought about that as well. I tried it three different times all with the same results.

[dual_basis]

Three? Well then, case closed!

[fao_]

Did the poster imply that their test was the be-all and end-all of error tolerance in common-use compressions systems? No. Then why did you assume that they did say that, and then write such a useless comment