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Compression Comparison

I want to send files over the WAN, as they tend to be huge I may want to compress those before sending them. But which archiving tool to use?

the following table might help you to choose:

ZIP and TGZ are very fast and are wide-spread, so everyone will be able to extract these formats on any platform without downloading extra software.

RAR has better (although the slowest) compression but is incredibly fast when decompressing.

However, I declare 7-Zip the winner. It has strong password encryption, can produce multi-volume archives, and the algorithms are open source and have been ported to many platforms.

Just in case you didn't know: TAR doesn't compress its contents. It just puts all the files into one big file for later compression with another program, e.g. GZip or BZip2 which in turn can only compress one single file. They're a perfect match.