Planned about clearing up my DropBox space for a while, and I just did it actually tonight.
With free space of 2 GB, you have to make every byte counts ! Ha ha, that’s the deal, every folders that you don’t use it any further, just back them up to save space and give those to another future projects to come.
As part of this, I did a little bit of research about the compression tool that best give the lowest byte output (compress really good) with the concern of time used to do that.
Take a look at these following links
- http://ubuntuguru.wordpress.com/2007/03/09/whats-the-best-file-compression-method/
- http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/dont-use-zip-use-rar.html
Although, 7z wins for the best compression ratio but its time consumption is totally high. In addition, with around 100 MB or so you just can ignore or compensate for the time needed to get 7z done on the file size around 1.4 GB as compared to bzip2. This is acceptable.
I chose bzip2 to do this thing as it’s really universal to have in most distro in Linux/Unix world.
As seen in the figure, I do tar-ball for all of those folders to back up first. Finally do the job of compression with bzip2.
With bzip2, I got 1 GB (reduced by 200 MB).
Anyway I decided to try 7z as well, and I’ve found one tool named Keka.
With 7z, I got 830 MB (reduced by around 400 MB twice from bzip2).
Nonetheless, what I learned here is that even though 7z is open source project but binary used on Mac is not easily to find, mostly you will find GUI based program in which no command line interface. What I want is a small and clean tool on command line to work with. So at this case I would stick to bzip2.
That’s all about my night sharing with you.
{Updated}
30 Nov 2011, 5:47 PM
- winladen replied to my post and confirmed that 7zip is the best algorithm out there. In addition, he suggested me this link for reference of comparison.
