Compression methods

[Player]

may someone explain the compression methods in ways of situations when one is best of the others? tar seems to be best (there are multiple types of tar?)

sorry all the methods that PA is capable of and i don’t know which to choose in cases

[Cyber Dog]

Tar is the lowest of all the types…it basically binds the files together without actually compressing them.

7-zip is the newest and most powerful of the compression schemes…if you want high compression ratios (smallest files), use 7-zip.

ZIP is the most widespread archiving format on the internet. While it generally gets on the low end of the compression levels, almost everybody already has software to open Zip files. If sharing files with friends you may wish to use ZIP.

GZipped and BZipped tars are basically tar files with compression added. Theyre used much more commonly in Unix environments than Windows environments. Compression for these is generally better than ZIP but worse than 7-Zip

These are the most popular types. Other types are used more sparsely and rarely have benefits thats outweigh the above.

[Player]

i’ve done a couple tests putting multiple files together using .7z and it was a larger size than when using .tar for a given selection of files. i don’t understand how .7z has more compression than?

[klumy]

for high compression

7-Zip
don’t forget to check “Solid compression” before compressing your files

for exchange with other users

ZIP
because every packer can handle ZIP

[TBGBe]

@Player:

i’ve done a couple tests putting multiple files together using .7z and it was a larger size than when using .tar for a given selection of files. i don’t understand how .7z has more compression than?

The only time this can happen is if the files you are “compressing” are already in a compressed format (which you may not have realised)!

E.g. Jpeg, Mpg etc.
Note some exe files are also “compressed”.

If the file are uncompressed, then any compression format will give a smaller resultant size than TAR - because TAR does not perform compression.
E.g. Try with multiple text files, word documents, bmp files etc.

With these, even using “fast” compression will produce a smaller archive filesize than TAR.

[Player]

thank you for the informative replies; that was helpful. thank you