Which method is more efficient overall?

I think “it” means what the zstd algorithm is doing, not what restic is doing.

You can easily check it yourself: Run prune --repack-uncompressed. I think this will never try to repack such data as it is stored as “compressed” (which in fact means, the data has been processed by the zstd enciding algorithm - which of course could have decided to just save the raw data)

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