Archiving compressed files: which format?

[Blue Velvet]

Before I move my work over to the Tiger drive, I thought it was about time I burned some completed projects onto some good-quality DVDs. There's about 30gb in total.

To save on disk space, I thought it might be best to compress the folders but which format will be universally and easily accessible in 5-8 years?

.sit, .sitx, compressed .dmg... Which one would you use? Or maybe something else? Or maybe not bother at all?

 

[mduser63]

I'd use compressed tarballs, or zip compression. Tar and gzip/bzip are open source, and therefore likely to be around a long time from now, while zip is by far the most popular compression format (and technically the "official" Mac compression format now). I've got .sit files from my Mac II that won't open in a new version of Stuffit expander. That's made me not really like or trust Stuffit anymore.

 

[yellow]

I'd use compressed tarballs, or zip compression.

I second this completely. tar/gzip are likely to exist for quite some time.

 

[Blue Velvet]

Thanks guys. Any recommended utilities?

Don't mind paying for them...

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

Terminal...

To Compress: tar czvf archivename.tgz folders

To eXtract: tar xzvf archivename.tgz (or just double click in Finder)

Fast and free...

 

[cube]

Install Fink and you'll get bzip2 (if you want even higher compression, I'd recommed rzip, but it's in the 'unstable' CVS/rsync distribution of Fink).

 

[mduser63]

Stuffit's DropStuff will also create compressed tarballs. Just pick tar and then choose whatever compression you'd like. GZip is probably more popular, but BZip has a higher compression ratio. Like Mitthrawnuruodo said, you can also use the terminal. Tiger comes with tar and bzip2 installed AFAIK. My installation has it anyway, and I didn't manually install them. I guess they might be part of the "BSD Subsystem" or the Developer's tools. You can check by just typing the following in Terminal:

tar

then type

bzip2

If you get meaningful output (ie. not "command not found") then you've got them, and the commands that Mitthrawnuruodo posted will work.

 

[motulist]

It depends on what you're compressing. Some file types, like movies, barely compress at all (from my experience). So whatever you compress with, compress one project as a test and see if the size saving is worth the tradeoff of more difficult archive creation and less future compatibility.

 

[Blue Velvet]

It depends on what you're compressing. Some file types, like movies, barely compress at all (from my experience). So whatever you compress with, compress one project as a test and see if the size saving is worth the tradeoff of more difficult archive creation and less future compatibility.

Design for print projects.

Folders containing: QuarkXpress, Illustrator, Photoshop files, humungous layered Tiffs, etc... the .psd files tend to compress well, layered tiffs less so if they have LZW compression on to start with.