.zip vs .tar.gz

[Karl Kuehn]

On Mar 28, 2008, at 4:19 PM, J. Todd Slack wrote:

> I have a bunch of old data that I want to compress up but still keep  
> on my system.
>
> So .zip vs .tar.gz?
>
> Which will produce a smaller archive?
>
> I know that I can pass a -9 to .gzip for max compression. Some of  
> these folders are gigs a piece...Testing this would take a long time  
> for me given the sizes of some items.
>
> Does anybody have thoughts?

	If you are on 10.5, and can be sure you don't have to uncompress the  
files on random other platforms (Windows is problematic at this  
point), then you might also want to look into rar. It has the benefits  
of both gz and zip (and beats tar by a lot).

> Is there a finder contextual menu extension where I can say  
> "Compress .tar.gz" just like there is to .compress .zip?


	By default there is only the zip item, but if you can find a plugin  
you can get just about anything.

--
		Karl Kuehn
			larkost at softhome.net