Turns out we're already doing a lot of compression at the file and filesystem level.

Plot twist: Your file manager reports directories in GB and files in GB converted to GiB with GB as units

/j

Well, yeah. The real advantage is only having a single file to transfer, makes eg. SFTP a lot less annoying at the command line.

Lossless compression works by storing redundant information more efficiently. If you've got 50 GB in a directory, it's going to be mostly pictures and videos, because that would be an incredible amount of text or source code. Those are already stored with lossy compression, so there's just not much more you can squeeze out.

I suppose you might have 50 GB of logs, especially if you've a logserver for your network? But most modern logging stores in a binary format, since it's quicker to search and manipulate, and doesn't use up such a crazy amount of disk space.

Efficiency

"Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our compression ratio." - tar cJf said to tar cjf

I dont remember him crushing a tank, is this an edit or did they release another watchmen movie?

compress ze file

Me compressing binary data

haha. I spent so much time looking for an efficient compression algorithm for audio and movies ... until I finally understood there are already compressed X) However it allow me to discover zst, wich is uncredible with text :

 35M test.log
801K test.7z
  32 test.log.7z
  46 test.log.tar.bz2
  45 test.log.tar.gz
 108 test.log.tar.xz
  22 test.log.tar.zst
2,1M test.tar.bz2
8,1M test.tar.gz
724K test.tar.xz
1,1M test.tar.zst
8,1M test.zip