archiving tools

[child@play]

after running over 7zip, being mentioned in this thread, i just did a quick test about how well it was performing.


downloaded and decompressed the xfrog-plants zip, having around 94.5 mb compressed, 147 mb uncompressed.

ran 7zip, choosing maximum compression settings, archive size 49.8 (!) mb, time taken to compress, about 3 minutes

winrar: took about 2 minutes, archived to .rar, 86.7 mb


anyone got results for other archivers, so we could compare them a bit?

[Virex]

Personaly, I'm using Izarc, which you can find at http://www.izarc.org/. I haven't bothered comparing it to other programms though.

[rcallicotte]

http://www.zipgenius.it/eng/index.php

[child@play]

tested IZArc : to .7zip format 50.2 mb
                    to .zip format 97.5 mb


zipgenius will be next

edit: no times for IZArc, only status-bar w/o time visible

edit2: zipgenius to 7zip : 84.0 mb
                      to  zip  : 97.5 mb

[moodflow]

so 7zip was getting 50% more compression (relative to standard winzip)??

[moodflow]

LOL, would be hilarious if someone created a "lossy" file compression scheme (like jpeg or mp3 are for media files). 

You'd zip up your files, then unzip to serious file corruption problems.  Actually it wouldn't be funny if it happened to anyone, but the idea is funny as hell...   

[Oshyan]

RAR and 7Z are the most effective current compression schemes. RAR is only really available for compression output in WinRAR, but 7Z's performance is usually almost as good and in some cases better. It's just that it's a bit less widely supported. Personally I find ZipGenius to be the best available freeware to support 7Z compression, but IZArc is a good option too. The old TugZip used to be tops in my book but extremely slow updates have pushed it off my list unfortunately.

The thing to keep in mind about compression formats is that they often compare differently for different source media. 7Z is particularly good at compressing geometry data, especially OBJ. RAR is better with other things, including Terragen TER terrains. But overall they're about equal and since 7Z is available for free it's much more compelling. To avoid the issue of support for the format you can simply use EXE self-extracting functionality (although this doesn't work for Macs).

- Oshyan