Zip vs. RAR vs. 7-Zip - best compression utility

[Adcadet]

I'm going through a bunch of my old files on my mass storage drive, and thinking about comrpessing a good number of them (the important ones are burned to CD and/or backed up on another HD anyway). I stumbled across 7-Zip and thought I'd compare it to WinZip and WinRAR. What is 7-Zip? According to their site, "7-Zip is free software distributed under the GNU LGP." A brief article on 7-Zip is here.

So, back to my situation. As an example, there's an anatomy webpage I created a little more than a year ago, that has largely been transformed due to a school-wide shift from regular web pages to a web-based "authoring, delivery and management" tool (WebCT). The folder takes up 670 MB, the majority from high-quality jpg's (yes, I know these are already compressed). A regular Zip archive created a .zip of 659 MB in 2 minutes, and WinRAR created a 647 MB file in 7 minutes. Creating a 7-Zip file took 13 minutes and created a file of 637 MBs. (note, I was doing some other things during these informal tests, so take the times with a large grain of salt).

I'm not sure the file size differences are major, but the time to create the RAR and 7-Zip archives is a bit annoying. Since Zip is so ubiquitous, I'm tempted just to stick with using Zip archives. Thoughts or comments?

 

[CougTek]

You've illustrated the advantages and cons of those three format. I tend to use RAR because I put space efficiency over speed ofcompression, but someone who has little time to waste is better with zip.

Mercutio will probably pop up to tell you that RAR is the root of all evil.

 

[time]

It's important to realize that no compressor achieves worthwhile gains on JPEG files. You are better off using a 'store' method (no compression) rather than wasting time trying to compress the incompressible.

If you apply zero compression to all of your files, yes, you may as well stick with the ZIP format. It's worth noting that WinRAR and 7-Zip can both create ZIP files, including uncompressed ones.

However, WinRAR can give you the best of both worlds if you select the Files tab on the Archive name and parameters dialog and enter *.jpg in Files to store without compression.

I'd like to see this option as a default on all archivers.

Although WinZip has the most powerful interface by far of any archiver, most people don't use most of the features, and its compression is largely useless. For general use, I recommend 7-Zip. It does most things (and is getting better all the time), offers just about the best allround compression, and is free for commercial use.

You just need to stick with things that are actually compressible.

 

[Adcadet]

This afternoon I compressed a few other things that I rarely use and wasn't mostly jpgs or other files that were already compressed. For most of those they compressed to ~60% of their original size with WinZip (into .zip) on standard settings.

 

[Mercutio]

I can't stand RAR because none of the windows-based tools for dealing with RAR files are nearly as nice Winzip. Most especially I think it takes way too long to compress or decompress RAR files. Blah.

Anything I really want compressed, I .tbz anyway.

 

[sechs]

Who's in a hurry to compress files anyway?