How much, on average, does zipping a file actually shrink it?

Question

Does it shrink some file types more than others? Is there better way to shrink files other than zipping them?

Answer 1

there is not really an 'average', because different filetypes do handle compression more than others.

plain text files can be compressed by a huge amount, pictures not so good, but audio and video generally can't be compressed by a great deal.

there may be an advantage of compressing to a *.rar file over a *.zip file in terms of the amount of compression, but not a huge advantage.

the handiest feature of zip/rar/tar/whatever files is probably the ability to store many files within one file, which is easier to transmit online compared to all the individual files one at a time.

Answer 2

The percentage of shrink is entirely dependent on the content of the file and how good ur zipping program is (and the options u choose when u zip)
As far as im concerned, there is no other way to reduce size of a file in Windows
However, in Mac Os X, u can create a virtual disk (extension dmg) to do so. This method seems to be popular among distrubutors of Mac software

Answer 3

It depends on which kind of file you're trying to compress. Text files can be compressed quite well, whereas compressing already compressed formats like .jpg for images or .mp3 for sound files is not going to gain you a lot of disk space.

Answer 4

I think you can package files in a CAB file or a self-unpacking EXE made in iexpress.