We had this discussion during Convergence. What’s the best compression program for NAV files (fbk, fdb, fob’s)?
For years I have been a true fan of WinRAR instead of WinZIP, primary due to the fact that WinRAR is compressing especially NAV files a lot better than WinZIP. But now I’m told that this is no longer the fact and that WinZIP should be able to do the job even better.
I have now tried it out and in my mind there is no doubt: WinRAR still rules!
My own tests showed me that whereas WinZIP in a few situations could compress a 100MB FDB file to 18MB and WinRAR was 19MB, then the other showed that WinRAR is better. Another 150MB FDB file was compressed to 32MB with WinZIP, but WinRAR was able to take it down to 15.5MB! And a 800MB FDB was compressed to 148MB. WinZIP needed 213MB for the same file…
When I said that WinZip 10 was better than RAR for FDB files, that was comparing Version 10 at maximum compression to RAR at maximum compression. The major advantage though is that there are still a handfull of people out there that dont have RAR.
I just did another test, where I was using the best compression option in WinZIP PPMd and here WinZIP was able to get it down to 145 against WinRAR’s 148. And the first test I did where WinRAR was 16MB, then now WinZIP was 14MB.
But I just feel that the PPMd option is much slower than WinRAR’s normal compression, just as slow as WinRAR’s best compression (which I have not been using in my tests).
I use winrar and i’ve changed the default setting to compress to zip file.
The great thing with winrar is that you can split the file into small separate files and it helps with uploading into ftp sites etc. If one fails you don’t have to start all over again.
This helps alot when you have to download or uplate gigs of data from customer db
A good suggestion. But it has a downside. When you use compression to ZIP, then it also only uses the ZIP methods, which means that my test file FDB of 150 MB was only compressed to 32MB whereas it was 16MB in the RAR format.
I use WinRAR and I like it better than WinZip because of what Rashed said: I can break it in smaller files which is handy when you need to load that backup to an ftp site or burn it on a CD.
It’s my default setting for compatibility reasons. As mentioned not everybody has winrar. I create rar or zip based on who I am creating the compression for. If you are a client then yeah that doesn’t matter, but I deal with 10 clients at a given week and don’t want to go through the hassles.
There are many compression routines but I prefer ZIP files, because everybody has ZIP. If I send a RAR file to someone I might get an question, “What is a RAR file?” ……
I know it is a (very) late reply, but I use 7-zip since a lot of time and I don’t have neither winzip or winrar installed on my PC.
Why I use it?
-It is free.
-It can read both zip,rar and some other formats.
-Standard settings: it is a little slower then winzip but compresses better than both winzip and winrar.
-I can split in smaller files with a format I want
-I can use multiple cores to 7zip
-I can encrypt the files and if I want also the filenames
-I can use it from dos if I want
-I can change the lower the priority, so while 7-zipping 2 or 3 or more files, I just feel it on memory-pressure, my processor/cores are 100% occuppied all the time, but if I do something else, it is not hindered because 7zip is in lower priority.
last time I used 7zip, when I was unraring a file and was running low on space, it errored and closed. Winrar, opens a window and asks to continue, and I very much like that feature.