From: Marc Heiler Date: 2008-02-19T09:50:24+09:00 Subject: Re: OT: Why are .zip files so much bigger than tar.gz files? Personally I am using mostly .tar.bz2 these days, simply because it compresses better than gz, even though gz is faster and nicer to your CPU. I have around 15 GIG of archivable material, if I would move this to gz I assume I would come to around 18 GIG, and when transferring on USB (via a ruby script automatically) every byte that is not transferred matters - some computers only have USB 1.1 and transfer is boringly slow already. But its mostly archival reasons here. :) PS: There recently was a comment about 7zip compressing even better than bzip. Just unfortunately, 7zip is hardly known and I will stick to bzip for now since its much more supported, known and also easy to handle (and doesnt look as attached to company-development as is 7zip) -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.