Compression Apps?

[ChevronX]

Whats the best application to compress stuff with? I came across a 100Meg file ages ago with like 20gig compressed in it. Whats the best do you guys recommend, I have a lot of data I want to compress so I can use space for more data.

[Darren Kitchen]

It really depends on what you're looking to acomplish. If you want to compress your drive to fit more on it, like many of us did in the 80's and 90's with software like doubledisk, stacker, etc, my first bit of advice would be to *stay away from that junk*

That said, keep in mind that much of the stuff that fills our hard drives these days (videos, music, images) are already in compressed formats like divx, xvid, quicktime, mp3, aac, jpeg, png, so compressing them again isnt going to yield spectacular results. in some cases it can even make the file larger.

To be honest you're best bet is to simply mow some lawns and buy a bigger hard drive.

Hope that was helpful.

Cheers,

Darren

[Garda]

I think that LZMA, the algorithm that 7zip uses gives the best ratios of any of the popular algorithms around. On Unix/Linux there are 2 tools at the moment that support this algorithm. LZMA utils and p7zip. p7zip is incompatible with 7zip, the windows utility.

Obviously though, some stuff compresses more. Music and videos have probably already been compressed so you're not going to get any better. Plain text usually works really well

[ChevronX]

Thanks guys, yep helpful as hell and it sounds common sense, since most file formats are compressed now. Thanks alot.

*gets out lawn mower*