Compressing?

Question

In regards to my last question, one of the answers was to compress. What is it exactly? Will I lose files? Will they be deleted? Where do they go? Anything in general I should know.

Answer 1

no point in compressing pictures, you wont be able to compress them that much. get a new harddrive or burn them to multiple DVDs/CDs to free up space. I'd get a new harddrive if i were you.

Answer 2

You won't lose anything. Think of a coke can that you can't fit in your pocket. If you crush it down under your foot to make it smaller, you can now fit it in your pocket. That's compression. Although a computer doesn't use your foot, it uses a mathmatical formula called an algorithm that figures out how to substitute some long sequences of byte with small shorter sequences of bytes, therefor making the files smaller. Compression has been around for as long as computers have been around. Your files will not get lost, damaged, or changed in any way. Depending on the speed of your computer it may take awhile to compress your files, and they may open a little bit slower, but you will definately use less space. Also how much each files compresses is extremely variable, so it may not save you very much space, or it may save you a ton of space. Give it a shot, it won't hurt anything.

Answer 3

Compression algorithms have been around since the 80's and are very stable.

Personally I don't use them for the following reasons. 1) they slow down the machine when accessing large files. 2) if anything does go wrong then data recovery can be a real pain in the butt 3) Even though they are great routines I have been bitten really badly and I'm not in any hurry to get bit again :)

I know people who use that feature regularly without any problems.

The prices of Hard Drives are low enough to get one that you don't need to use compression. Wait for sales etc. I added a 250GB drive to my 80DB drive for $129.00 with rebates a six months ago and I have 200GB free. It's going to take awhile. Plus you can archive stuff to DVD

now if your talking about winzip or something like that then that's a whole different story.

I use winzip and filezip to compress files to send in emails.

Answer 4

No, you won't lose files by compressing them. Using the program WINZIP, for instance, you can shrink files down quite a bit, particularly if they're text or document files. Also, if you have a lot of photo files in .bmp or .tif format, you can open them up with your photo editor program, and then save them in the .jpg format which makes them MUCH smaller in byte size. For instance, say you have a photo file named MYDOG.BMP...you could open that file up in your photo editor, then click on "File", and then "Save As", and save it as MYDOG.JPG and you'd see a huge difference in the size of the two files. Good luck.