On top of enabling indexing, it reduces the amount of data lost in the event of data corruption — something you get for free with block-based compression algorithms like BWT-based bzip2 but is most of the time missing from dictionary-based algorithms like LZ-based gzip.
I don't think many people use that last property or are even aware of it, which is a shame. I wrote a tool (bamrescue) to easily recover data from uncorrupted blocks of corrupted BAM files while dropping the corrupted blocks and it works great, but I'd be surprised if such tools were frequently used.
I don't think many people use that last property or are even aware of it, which is a shame. I wrote a tool (bamrescue) to easily recover data from uncorrupted blocks of corrupted BAM files while dropping the corrupted blocks and it works great, but I'd be surprised if such tools were frequently used.