Compression!

[CreativeOne]

Hello! I have roughy 20 gigs of very important data I need to back up. (Movies and Games) well I was looking for some recommendations on Compression or another way of backing up this data.

I do have a DVD Burner capable of 4.7 (Obviously)

Secrets? Best Compression?

 

[khha4113]

Windows XP has its own compression software that can compress files to zip file type.

 

[CreativeOne]

Well I knew that. But I was trying to get recommended software, Winrar, 7-zip, winzip. What the best compression utility is and the format.

 

[KennyG]

Well if you have a DVD burner, I wouldn't even bother taking the time to compress anything (especially video as it typically doesn't compress well anyways). I mean 20gigs is like 5 dvds, I go through that in a week. Also saves the time of compressing, then decompressing when you need it again etc.

However when I do need to compress something (usually to fit x amount of things on one DVD), I use winrar.

 

[pscowboy]

I swear by Winzip. Buy the full Pro version ($50); you get many more features. The best of which you can super compress and send it directly to your CD drive.

 

[Ned_Flanders]

WinRar's .rar is better file size wise (i.e on average it is smaller)

 

[Spielwurfel]

The format that best compress archives is the 7-zip format, but it can't compress this amount of data! So I recommend you to use WinRar, with the rar format... It won't compress all your data to 4.7 Gb, since you're compressing music and games (CD images, i think), but you'll surely reduce it a lot! And WinRar can compress all your data creating compressed files of the size you want! You must type the size of the file in bytes, so if you want CD's of 4,7 Gb, you'll have to type this number: 5046586572 (this number in bytes represents 4,7 Gb)

 

[CreativeOne]

Thats exactly what I wanted to know!

Thank You!