Recently I am dealing with huge data (140GB) for my research and once I start the processing of the data, it would be double or triple of the original size.
Before I start the processing, I have to backup the original data first. That is the most troublesome task for me as it take a lot of hardisk space and time to do so. In order to save the disk space, I have no choice but compress the files. I do not know if anyone make some comparisons on the compression softwares available in the market (shareware/freeware, as I have no money to buy the licensed retail version) before, I tried three, namely Winzip version 11.1, WinRAR version 3.71 and Windows XP ”Send to compressed folder” wizard (two actually, as one is the function included in Microsoft Windows XP) and make some comparison:
Not to take into account the maximum compression option in the softwares (I just used the default setting, to maximize the compression time instead of space in this case), I tested the softwares with one of my data file (TIF format, original size 840MB) and the results are shown as follow:
Compression Result
To my surprise, WinRAR gives the best compression (I expected it to be Winzip), it compressed up to 58% where the Winzip and Windows default file compression Wizard only give the compression of 75.1% and 75.3% respectively. Now I know why still a lot of users use WinRAR than Winzip. There are dozen of compression softwares available (see Wikipedia), maybe there are some better than WinRAR, please let me know if you have some goodies to recommend, thanks!
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