Best free file compression software in your opinion?

evo4ever86 · 19 Mar 2019 at 23:03

Hey all

I've been using 7-Zip for quite some time now and im wandering whether theres better/faster file compression software out there?

I've already used WinRAR and WinZIP so dont recommend these as I think 7-Zip is superior! What are your thoughts?

Orcvader · 20 Mar 2019 at 09:54

7-Zip still is the best and still very simple to use, everything else just feels bloated compared to it.

chroniclard · 20 Mar 2019 at 09:58

Used 7-zip for the past 10+ years, not really had any reason to switch.

Rroff · 20 Mar 2019 at 10:03

Still using 7-Zip and WinRAR here.

jpaul · 20 Mar 2019 at 10:31

I use 7-Zip, but, on media files, does not gain a lot imhop
..I would be looking for multi-threaded/core apps, if I had some serious compression (hierarchical directories) to do, not sure 7-zip does that

Alright · 20 Mar 2019 at 11:39

As others said, still using 7-Zip. There's really no good reason to change it after all these years.

Rroff · 20 Mar 2019 at 11:53

jpaul said:
not sure 7-zip does that

7-Zip does use threading depending on settings used - though off the top of my head I think it still uses 2 threads heavily for a lot of stuff but potentially can use 16+.

Deleted member 77746 · 20 Mar 2019 at 12:42

7-Zip

AthlonXP1800 · 20 Mar 2019 at 18:06

I used WinZip back in Windows 3.1 day then soon later moved to WinRAR because I found it was faster than WinZip.

I few years ago I read about 7-Zip surpassed WinRAR in compression benchmarks then I installed 7-Zip to tested downloaded and uncompressed files and compared to WinRAR, I was impressed 7-Zip is faster so I uninstalled WinRAR and stick with 7-Zip. But a month later I downloaded and uncompressed files and drivers with 7-Zip and it threw up data error during files uncompressed, I thought files and drivers I downloaded was corrupted so I redownloaded it 5 times and it still threw up data error then tried downloaded older 7-Zip version but it still threw up data error. Hmmmm so I decided to downloaded and installed WinRAR and I very surprised to see the same files and drivers downloaded 5 times was uncompressed just fine with WinRAR which 7-Zip claimed it was corrupted. I realised 7-Zip is a garbage waste of time and uninstalled it.

I now stick with WinRAR, been used WinRAR for amazing 25 years now.

7-Zip is very unreliable.

Armageus · 20 Mar 2019 at 18:14

AthlonXP1800 said:
7-Zip is very unreliable.

Just your pc imo - no-one else has a problem, I've not had a problem in 10 years of using it, including for some long term archiving of business files.

jpaul · 20 Mar 2019 at 18:15

AthlonXP1800 said:
I realised 7-Zip is a garbage waste of time and uninstalled it.

so your downloaded file may have had some checksum problems, that winrar ignored/worked-around and 7-zip baulked on. .. one swallow .....

edit - checking winrar doc

1. Recovery Records

When you create a new archive using WinRAR, you can add so called recovery records to it. To do so, you simply check the "Add Recovery Record" box when the archive name and parameters dialog appears.
..
The recovery information increases the archives size by 3% by default. This means basically that you will be able to restore up to 3% of missing or damaged data by default.

Rroff said:
though off the top of my head I think it still uses 2 threads heavily for a lot of stuff but potentially can use 16+.

it seems unclear about true parallel encode capabilities https://superuser.com/questions/142021/7-zip-compression-on-multi-core-computers.
However, did see there appears to be a designated p(arallel)bzip2 programme too, I always use bzip2 in the unix world, and, had not realised you can get it for windows too

Energize · 1 Apr 2019 at 20:13

jpaul said:
I use 7-Zip, but, on media files, does not gain a lot imhop
..I would be looking for multi-threaded/core apps, if I had some serious compression (hierarchical directories) to do, not sure 7-zip does that

Lossless compression methods like 7zip will have no effect on media files because they have already been compressed in a lossy compression method, you need to convert the files to HEVC to reduce the size.

jpaul · 1 Apr 2019 at 20:51

that's demonstrably not the case ... clearly they are already compressed, but zip compression technique could be more/less efficient on some media files

Rroff · 1 Apr 2019 at 20:53

Energize said:
Lossless compression methods like 7zip will have no effect on media files because they have already been compressed in a lossy compression method, you need to convert the files to HEVC to reduce the size.

Depends a bit - some media will be encoded for low latency decoding, etc. and can benefit from more CPU/memory intensive compression routines used for packing files.

I think it was WinIMP that has an algorithm specifically for media files which while quite CPU hungry can get some quite impressive ratios on media already using efficient codecs.

Energize · 1 Apr 2019 at 21:12

jpaul said:
that's demonstrably not the case ... clearly they are already compressed, but zip compression technique could be more/less efficient on some media files

That demonstrates my point exactly, the compression ratio there is negligible.

jpaul · 1 Apr 2019 at 21:31

7zip doesn't seem to have the options of unix bzip2 either, where you can get it to try harder, at the expense of more cpu time .. which we used to do when internet bandwidth was expensive.

lurkio · 2 Apr 2019 at 10:05

7z , from tests it compresses stuff extremely well

jpaul · 2 Apr 2019 at 13:32

lurkio said:
7z , from tests it compresses stuff extremely well

.... compared against ?

bzip2, which i have not tried on windows says

bzip2 is a freely available, patent free, high-quality data compressor. It typically compresses files to within 10% to 15% of the best available techniques (the PPM family of statistical compressors), whilst being around twice as fast at compression and six times faster at decompression. The code is organised as a library, with a programming interface. The bzip2 program itself is a client of the library. You can use the library in your own programs, to directly read and write .bz2 files, or even just to compress data in memory using the bzip2 algorithms.

lurkio · 2 Apr 2019 at 13:43

tried zip format on highest compression and winrar on highest compression setting, against 7z LZMA2 highest setting
maybe I should have tried 7z bzip2

lurkio · 2 Apr 2019 at 15:02

just tried it out thanks for recommending bzip2
373,208,087 B076VP84PT.rar
325,318,642 B076VP84PT_bzip2.7z
326,001,107 B076VP84PT_LZMA2.7z
325,278,122 B076VP84PT_PPMd.7z
the above done using 7z
7z has ability to create bzip2 / LZMA2 / PPMd / zip archives