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A Look at Data Compression
With the new year fast approaching many of us look to the unenviable task of backing up last years data to make room for more of the same. That being said, rojakpot has taken a look at some of the data compression programs available and has a few insights that may help when looking for the best fit. From the article: "The best compressor of the aggregated fileset was, unsurprisingly, WinRK. It saved over 54MB more than its nearest competitor - Squeez. But both Squeez and SBC Archiver did very well, compared to the other compressors. The worst compressors were gzip and WinZip. Both compressors failed to save even 200MB of space in the aggregated results."
A key benefit to PKZIP and tarballs formats is that they will be accessible for decades or hundreds of years. These formats are open (non-proprietary), widely implemented, and free (as in freedom) software.
The same can't be said for WinRK. Therefore, if you plan to want access to your data for a long period of time, you should carefully consider whether the format will be accessible.
"I just don't understand the desire for compression in the first place."
Sometimes, people have to download things.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
3 hours 47 minutes with WinRK versus gzipping in 3 minutes 16 seconds. Is it really worth watching the progress bar for 200 megs smaller file?