what is the point in archive programs like winzip and winrar?

Question

to me it's only useful to unzip programs that are zipped w/ it. which only makes things harder. the compression if your lucky seems to only maybe knock off about 1 mb if your lucky. if i'm wrong please let me know and how to get more compression out of it. but every time i try to archive a file it comes out either the same size bigger or probably a half a mb smaller. if thats the case than these programs suck.

mp3's. program files and all audio files seem like the only files big enough to need compression but it doesn't do anything to those? why would i need to compress image files that are fairly small. how many image files would i be uploading?

Answer 1

Compression will only significantly reduce space taken by some types of files, typically text files, pictures etc that have amounts of contiguous data bytes which are the same. Program files are not like that and very few bytes next to each other are the same so cannot be compressed much, and in some cases will be bigger because of the wrapper the compressor puts round the output file. However zip etc will cram many files into one file to make it easier to distribute even if its not smaller.

Answer 2

It always depends what you are zipping. For instance, an image will have a great change if it's an extension that doesn't compress your image at all from the start (.bmp, for instance). It helped me loads of times to make an email smaller for exemple, when I wanted to send images.

If you zipped something from a program that was already efficient at compressing the data, indeed, you won't see a change.

It is also useful if you want to regroup a number of files together. For exemple of a use of that, making a download available on a website that as in it a read-me file, plus a program. It will be smaller to host and it will also make only one download for the users instead of two.

Answer 3

Well, the zip and rar first and for most if to compress files. But, some user also uses it to save up time, because, if you are uploading something or sending attachments, you will only need to upload one file, rather than uploading many files.
What if you got 50 files to send to your buddy using email attachment? It is going to be difficult to upload those pictures one by one right. So that's the point of using a rar or zip files.

Answer 4

Winzip and Winrar are useful for many other things than compressing files to gain space on your hard drive. Zipping a file often means you can email it, whereas it's too large to send without compression. Downloading a zip file takes minutes. Downloading the whole file could take hours.

Answer 5

ZIP programs have been around forever because they have a specific purpose AND do it very well. They bically strip out spaces between words and paragraphs, etc.

Files that are already "compressed", like ".jpg" files, can't be made much smaller. But, Word docs, for example, can be made much smaller because they are not compressed.

Try it yourself and you'll see what I mean.