(no subject)
Dec. 5th, 2019 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellwayI had vaguely gotten the impression that 7-zip was newfangled and not widely supported, and then my university gave me a bunch of 7-zipped practice-data files for a course intended to be taken by tech-illiterate people using Windows.
(also it turns out it's 20 years old)
"Wait," I thought, "if manipulating .7z files on Windows is so easy that someone who's never so much as used a word processor can do it, why has it not replaced .zip? What's the *actual* catch?"
It seems that the *actual* tradeoff for the smaller file size is that it takes longer to compress. (The one I have going right now estimates it'll take a total time of 4 - 5 hours, for a folder that normally takes about 40 minutes.) Probably not worth it for things like my Thunderbird backup where I'm making fresh zips a couple times a month, but worth switching to for long-term storage.
A couple hours later, my personal archives take up ~1.8GB less space. 7-zipping seems to be particularly good (relative to ordinary .zips) on wget scrapes and other HTML files.
(also it turns out it's 20 years old)
"Wait," I thought, "if manipulating .7z files on Windows is so easy that someone who's never so much as used a word processor can do it, why has it not replaced .zip? What's the *actual* catch?"
It seems that the *actual* tradeoff for the smaller file size is that it takes longer to compress. (The one I have going right now estimates it'll take a total time of 4 - 5 hours, for a folder that normally takes about 40 minutes.) Probably not worth it for things like my Thunderbird backup where I'm making fresh zips a couple times a month, but worth switching to for long-term storage.
A couple hours later, my personal archives take up ~1.8GB less space. 7-zipping seems to be particularly good (relative to ordinary .zips) on wget scrapes and other HTML files.
