I have lots of important files (documents, music, photos and some videos). I have put them all in one folder that totals 10GB and I want to compress this and store it on another drive. What is a good free application that can compress this folder, and what kind of size might it accomplish? Encryption doesn't really matter but it would be a bonus. Thanks
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Good FREE Compression Tool
- Thread starter conor ordan
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
If it's only 10GB of data, why the need to compress?
Mac OS X has a built in compression tool. It creates a .zip file.
But don't expect much loss in GB with the final file size, as your videos, music and photos might be already highly compressed, and with a compression tool you won't gain much in terms of compression.
Mac OS X has a built in compression tool. It creates a .zip file.
But don't expect much loss in GB with the final file size, as your videos, music and photos might be already highly compressed, and with a compression tool you won't gain much in terms of compression.
If you launch Terminal you can also use the commandline tools like gzip to compress the files/dirs you want. The amount of compression that is possible depends on what files you want to compress. Lot's of mp3's or jpg's are useless to compress because those files already are compressed to some extend (it's the reason why they are so small in filesize). Text files, bitmaps and such compress better because they do not use compression them self.