After reading Jeff Atwood's Feb 23 post on his Coding Horror blog, I had to take a look at WinRAR.
I have been a big fan of Zip since the beginning; and I mean the beginning. Phil Katz wrote PKARC in assembler back in the mid eighties. When he came out with PKARC, I switched from ARC to PKARC and never looked back. He later renamed it to PKZIP (and PKUNZIP). Fast forward to the recent past and WinZip was born using the same compression technology. I never thought about considering something else.
Reading Jeff's entry got me thinking about the compression that I do today. I commonly compress files that are tens of gigabytes in size and move then around the network. I back these up on to other hard drives for archival purposes. When I saw the increased compression available with WinRAR, I downloaded the evaluation copy and tried it out.
I took a small backup I created on Friday. The file itself was 1,310,544KB. The file produced by WinZip was 1,002,247KB. I thought that the backup process itself compressed the data so there was little more that WinZip could do. Using WinRAR I ended up with a file size of 871,384KB.
That is a huge savings as far as I am concerned. I was going to try it on a 45GB file but after the savings I already saw, I am just going to go ahead and convert the processes over to WinRAR.
Thanks, Jeff!