Compression Utility

[Omnituens]

Hi

Im looking for an application capable of massive compression. I've seen 1.2+ GB compressed to 500MB, but i dont know how its done. ive got loads to back up and i need to compress some folders

any pointers?

[Blind Paul]

Hi Omni,


Hi

Im looking for an application capable of massive compression. I've seen 1.2+ GB compressed to 500MB, but i dont know how its done. ive got loads to back up and i need to compress some folders

any pointers?

You probably know, that it's mostly depending on the kind of data you want to compress, but perhaps you can give some more data, what you are after:

- Platform (Win, Mac, *nix)?
- graphical / command line
- you want to tape, MO, CD, DVD, HD it ?

greetings
Paul :cool:

[Oath]

depends what it is.

Also depends if the owner has compressed it already, most setups i believe are compressed into the installer. So compressing them again wouldnt really reap any benefits.

As for dvd's and movies, xvid, divx etc make massive reductions in size, however lead to some loss in quality. As for pure compression though i generaly just use winrar, winzip got ******** a while ago.

[msdong]

rar with multiple volumes. or ace with multiple volumes too.

[Oath]

rar with multiple volumes. or ace with multiple volumes too.

Good point, i forgot about that :)

[athon]

IMHO: tar bzip2 > *

Athon Solo

[landofcake]

As i think someone said, it really does depend on the Nature of the file. I've seen some things that should be in the region of 700mb compressed down to about 50mb simply because of the nature of the data.

In this example it was a CD Image that was 700mb as image 'padding' where the actual date only represented about 50mb or so of the file :cool:

And to agree with yet more people, rar or ace would be your best bet for compression and compatibility.

[msdong]

IMHO: tar bzip2 > *...

if you own a highend machine to run a GUI why not use a packer with a GUI :D that is easy to use.

why open a console and type when you can do all with 3 clicks? sometimes GUI can be your friend.

[Omnituens]

yeah, most of the data is already compressed so i only managed to get about 50MB off it, so it still wont get on 1 cd.

ah well thanks for the input guys.

[landofcake]

yeah, most of the data is already compressed so i only managed to get about 50MB off it, so it still wont get on 1 cd.

ah well thanks for the input guys.

unlucky 8(

[athon]

if you own a highend machine to run a GUI why not use a packer with a GUI :D that is easy to use.

why open a console and type when you can do all with 3 clicks? sometimes GUI can be your friend.
1) Because I haven't found a faster tool than the official tar and bzip2 binaries.

2) If I wanted to I can do that using just about any of the linux graphical archivers or 7zip (plus probably a number of others) under Windows. I could probably make my own context menu item if I could be bothered. I tend to work a fair bit on the command line anyway, atleast under Linux (don't do much other than play games under Windows - especially now Fireworks runs under Crossover Office).

3) I haven't compressed much since I got my shiny 200GB HDD. (Formatting 100GB partition to FAt32 (for sharing between Windows and Linux): Windows XP: Too big; DOS Format: Starts formatting, takes ages, too big; Linux dos filesystem utils: Successfully completed before you can say "how long is this going to take?" really really fast, once.)

If it weren't for the damned games developers stupid addiction to DirectX, I'd probably be able to get rid of Windows altogether by now.

Athon Solo