Four Compression And Archiving Solutions Compared

Proprietary Formats: Compression Rate, Size, And Duration

First, we looked at the proprietary formats supported by each of the four solutions. Remember that the total size of the source files is 650MB. We always used default compression, as well as the best compression settings we could find in the tools’ GUIs.

Looking at the resulting file size, we get quite impressive savings. Clearly, the LZMA compression and FreeArc’s ARC seem to work best, giving you between 350MB and 356MB results.

The compression ratio in our diagram tells you just how much smaller the target archives are. The range starts at 39.5% smaller and ends at 46.2 percent.

This diagram tells you the opposite. What’s the target file size in relation to the source data?

The time required for compression is also important. While WinZip actually took between three and a half and four minutes, 7-Zip with LZMA2 and default compression only took 45 seconds for the same workload. Clearly, processing time differs significantly. On the summary page, we multiply the processing time and end file size to reach an overall index that takes both factors into account.