Newer Compression Technologies

I stumbled across this little gem the other day.

http://freearc.org/Default.aspx

I often compress 4-500Mb Windows Xampp Servers with their Website Contents to keep versions.

I seal a fully working version of the website (they are business assets and valuable)  in a zip file, because it ensures that it’s not been tampered with in any way since it was zipped. Additionally you can encrypt the contents during zipping to prevent theft, which is a good idea if your website is cutting edge and everyone would like a copy of your code. Not to mention, it’s safe to save an Encrypted zip file to an encrypted USB stick if you are carrying it about. If you lose the stick, nothing to worry about, 2 layers of security.

Anyway, zipping good, millions of files all over the disk…bad.

It can take somewhere between 2-3 minutes on my machine, granted, the cpu is now 4 years old. (My laptop is approximately twice as powerful in terms of CPU)
The problem with old fashioned zip technologies like 7zip, zip, bzip, rar etc, most are single threaded.

I got round this in Linux by using Pigz, which is excellent, it massively reduces Webserver backups in time spent, which keeps the I/O load down and websites more responsive.

All that aside, if you have Windows Peazip installed (google, cba on linking currently), there is a format called Freearc, which uses multiple cores, and has reduced my compression times to under a minute, and produces smaller archives.

These benchmarks say it all. I’ve linked to the original, Freearc is the blue dots, the tiny ones on the right are old technologies which probably 99% of the internet are still using. The other competitor in red is Nanozip, which comes in 2nd.

I don’t see standard ZIP formats anywhere there, so just a hint, time to move to the future people…or now even.