Digital Home Thoughts: There's Always Room For Compression!

"There are plenty of software options available for storing, compressing, and archiving data in different ways. These tools no longer simply reduce file size and merge your input files into a single, manageable archive. They also support automatic downsizing of images, virus-checking, content-checking to avoid unnecessary compression of files that already are compressed, splitting, encrypting, and more."

The importance of compression has flucuated over the years. Back in the days of dial-up access, compression was vital. Anything you downloaded usually came in the form of a zip, lzh or arc file. With ample storage and faster bandwidth, compression may not be quite as important, but it has become ubiquitous in the form of image and video codecs. Still, there are many uses for compression, such as encrypting files, collecting a group of files together and yes, even shrinking large files into more managable chunks. Tom's Hardware does a good comparison, and I think what should be of note is that there are viable free programs that can be used for your archiving needs. There has been more than a few times where I have helped people out who think that for any application, one has to buy it. For lots of applications, that is just not true. Personally, I favour 7-Zip. It is free, but I find it works quite well, and more importantly, it is really easy to use. What is your choice?