Your choice for best compression software

[SiberianHuskey]

What do you find as the best and fastest compression software ?

[felgall]

Do you want best compression or fastest compression? The two are almost mutually exclusive.

[logic_earth]

There is a lot to pick from: Wikipedia:Comparison_of_file_archivers I personally use 7-zip.

[AlexDawson]

I use WinRar, I find that RAR has better compression ratio's than ZIP, ACE and sometimes 7z, though you want a client that supports all four of those formats as they are pretty common on the web (which means you may find yourself needing to open one of them), WinRar is commercial however 7-Zip is open source / freeware and does just a good a job

[Dan Grossman]

Plain 'ol .zip. The algorithms are fast and the compression ratio's good enough.

[wwb_99]

Kinda depends on what you were doing. I was working on a game a while back where we needed to fit stuff on a CD-rom, and it turned out that RAR has some magics that saved us 10% of space. But that was an edge case. Really, the more important thing to worry about is "what can my client handle" rather than some technical feats of manhood.

[SiberianHuskey]

WinRAR I was considering using as my primary compression software over all others. 7-zip is nice but I heard some minor beefs about it.

[logic_earth]

...7-zip is nice but I heard some minor beefs about it.

Like what?

[SiberianHuskey]

I don't recall as I read it off a web site, it wasn't a serious beef just a minor flaw within the software.

[logic_earth]

So in other words you have no idea if this "minor beef" even affects you? I just wanted to make sure. I'm of the belief not to listen to anyone's opinion (aka, some web site) on software until I try it out for myself.

[rushiku]

So in other words you have no idea if this "minor beef" even affects you? I just wanted to make sure. I'm of the belief not to listen to anyone's opinion (aka, some web site) on software until I try it out for myself.

Dude, it was on the internet, it must be true.

[SiberianHuskey]

Well from what I recall, they mentioned it's compression was good but the speed that it compressed at was a little slow, if someone can verify this or deny it. Regardless I'm looking for something that one can jazz up the compression software GUI if that's an option in 7-zip ?

[felgall]

Most compression software allow you to select a number of different compression options depending on how fast you want it to run or how much you want it to compress the files. For example winzip allows you to select between 5 different levels of compression depending on how compressed you want the result or how fast you want it to run.

[SiberianHuskey]

You are right felgall, but I'd like to hear some suggestions and personal use by some people since there are so many out there.

[Force Flow]

I use winRAR as my primary archiver, but also have 7zip installed for when the occasional need arises.

For personal archiving, I use the rar format. For sending files to others, I use the zip format unless I know they can already work with rar.

My only gripe is the 255 character limit in file paths when attempting to unzip something. Not a fault of the archiver apps, but a limitation of Windows XP.


I did use winzip and winAce back in the Windows 98 days, but I later preferred to use winRAR.

[SiberianHuskey]

I think I'm going to go with WinRAR as well as my primary compression software.

[felgall]

So how many different compression levels do winRar and 7Zip support and how do they compare with the five different compression levels winZip supports?

[Dan Grossman]

So how many different compression levels do winRar and 7Zip support and how do they compare with the five different compression levels winZip supports?

WinRAR supports 6 levels of compression for ZIP, as well as the ability to create profiles for:

• RAR or ZIP compression, with custom compression level
• Split to volumes by bytes
• Delete files after archiving
• Test archived files
• Lock archives
• Save NTFS file security or not
• Save NTFS file streams or not
• Create recovery volumes
• Archive in the background
• Turn PC off when done archiving
• Wait on other copies of WinRAR to finish or not
• Set archive passwords
• Include and exclude lists
• Store relative paths, or full paths, or full paths with drive letter
• Put each file in a separate archive
• Automatically send an archive by e-mail when finished creating
• Erase disk contents before archiving (for automatically replacing backups with new backups)
• Add only files with the 'Archive' attribute set to the archive
• Clear the 'Archive' attribute after compressing
• Open shared files or not
• Generate archive names with a date pattern
• Store creation, last accessed and modification time
• Only include files newer than X
• Set the archive time to (now, original archive time, latest file time)
• Add archive comments

And can open RAR, TAR, ZIP, GZIP, CAB, UUE, BZ2, ARJ, LZH, JAR, ACE, ISO, 7Zip and Z files.

[masm50]

I currently use jZip as my compression software. It is basically 7-Zip with a pretty interface and has opened pretty much everything I've thrown at it, which is generally zip, rar, tar, and even hjsplit files which can be useful.

[SiberianHuskey]

How is jZip is it fast and does it compress well ?

[masm50]

As I said, jZip uses the 7-zip compression engine, so its stats are basically the same and generally considered pretty good from what I understand.

[felgall]

As I said, jZip uses the 7-zip compression engine, so its stats are basically the same and generally considered pretty good from what I understand.

How many different levels of compression does it support?

[masm50]

The compression settings are a little buried in menus, but it supports 6 levels (from store to ultra) which is what I understand to be the case with 7-Zip

[Dan Grossman]

What's with the focus on how many levels of compression there are?

I can write a zip utility that gives you 100 levels of compression by having it choose to ignore some patterns that could be compressed X% of the time.

[felgall]

What's with the focus on how many levels of compression there are?

I can write a zip utility that gives you 100 levels of compression by having it choose to ignore some patterns that could be compressed X% of the time.

The OP asked about fastest compression and best compression and the program most likely to be offering both is the one with the greatest number of different levels offered (although it could just offer two - no compression at all for fastest and compress everything possible even if it takes a month for best)