<i>If you are archiving logs by first compressing them using something like gzip, you no longer have plain text log files.</i><p>Well yeah, but that's because I'm already done parsing the log and/or using it for debugging. If I wasn't done with it, I wouldn't have archived it.<p>But I know that when I pull a 3 year old log out of the archive, I can gunzip it and will still be able to read it, no matter how much the file format has changed since then, and I don't have to dig up a 3 year old magic decoder program (that may only run on one operating system) to be able to see what's in the file.