Author Topic: Which form of compression (Read 1792 times)

Reno · « **on:** March 12, 2006, 19:26 »

What application do you use to backup and compress your data? Ive used winrar for a good long time now. It doesn't really serve me to compress as much as to archive.

Symantecs ghost is the most powerful archiver ive come across. Its too bad it was ment for whole partricians and not individual folders.

Simon · « **Reply #1 on:** March 12, 2006, 20:13 »

I used to use WinZip all the time, but now I mainly use the compressor / extractor built into Windows XP. I use WinRar if I need to open .rar files, and I recently discovered PowerISO, when I needed to open a .daa file, which I had never come across before. I also occasionally use AlphaZip, which opens .tar files, but I've yet to find one that does it all.

Sandra · « **Reply #2 on:** March 12, 2006, 20:54 »

Have a look for KGB Archiver Bob.
Its free and compresses a lot more than any other similar program but it is slow for larger files.

I use PowerQuests Drive Image for backing up partitions in prefernence to Norton Ghost.
Mainly because I couldnt understand Ghost the first time I looked at it and Drive Image seemed more straightforward.

Reno · « **Reply #3 on:** March 12, 2006, 22:50 »

Quote from: "Sandra"

Have a look for KGB Archiver Bob.
Its free and compresses a lot more than any other similar program but it is slow for larger files.

I went looking shortly after I made this thread and found kgb but just like winrar I couldn't get it to compress more then a couple of tenths of a mb off the average size of an mp3 file. It also would crash when i would try to compress using its extreme compression. I probably wasn't using it right.

edit

I just read this artical which told me compression is more successful with certain file types.

Quote

The compression ratio varies according to the type of file being used. For instance, a Word document, with a .doc extension, can be reduced up to 16 times, while a sound file with a .wav extension or an Acrobat file (.pdf) can barely be reduced, since their standard file format already compresses files during the standard "saving" procedure.

I just tested this by using winrar to compress a 113kb access file down to a 7kb rar file. So this pretty much means compression is only good with text based files and not good with media files.

http://www.masterviews.com/2001/07/13/compressing_files_using_winzip.htm

Sandra · « **Reply #4 on:** March 12, 2006, 23:42 »

Didnt realise that Bob, makes sense though I suppose.

Howd you go on renaming an mp3 as a .doc and compressing that I wonder :?