prly a rly big text file lol anyways, 7-zip all the way, best one.

I have about 100 GB of files. One of my 120 GB hard drives is running out of space, and I need some way to somehow shrink these files to a more managable size. Any ideas?

Thanks

win rar, win zip? how about putting files that you dont use very often on cd or dvd?

What is .rar? Is that a Mac thing?

no, its a windows thing. i think it gives better compression than .zip

rar works with any OS.  It is a compression format like zip.  It makes files smaller then zip though.

compression works best with text based files and pictures due to the repeats in the file itself, ie removing all the repeating words and replacing them with a number. the numbers are then put into a type of dictionary that would decipher the compression when decompressed.

as far as compressing things like mp3s or mpegs, you wont get much compression with them, i just zipped 382 megs of mp3s to zip and the resulting file was 377megs. A 5.5 meg document file was compressed to 350kb.

best thing to do would be to back up files to disc like antman said or delete all your pr0n 😛

7-zip OWNS winzip. winrar and any other one of those. LZMA compression is waaaayyyy better then Deflate (zip). http://www.7-zip.org . Supports winrar, winzip, tar, etc. I use it all the time, and its free!

Consider an external hard drive.

DELETE!

I don’t want to have to delete or backup on DVD (I do have a burner though). I don’t want to use an external HD, as I have two perfectly good ones. I tink I’ll try rar or 7zip. thanks 😊

Defintly rar what you don’t need. But remember, when things are compressed, they take longer to open…

if you are going to access those files often, then buy a new HD… Compressing and umcompressing files that you use often is annoying

7-zip LZMA Compression is faster then RAR…

I downloaded a 45mb .rar

Turned out it was a 1.5gb file after uncompress 8)

[quote author=“Lightsky”]I downloaded a 45mb .rar

Turned out it was a 1.5gb file after uncompress 8)

That is fully BS. Compressiong cannot reach that high of a level.

Was most likely a set of 45mb rars, and he opened one and put them together

StuffIt is one of the best compression programs out.  It’s worth the
trial to see for yourself.