I thought of this tip while archiving some old files into “deep storage”. As you may know I have referred to 7-Zip many times in past tips, so once again I am going to go to the well.

Typically whenever I use compressed files, I use zip format with normal level compression, however today when truly archiving files I used 7z format with ultra level compression. Of course the higher the level of compression, the more time and system resources it uses to both compress and uncompress it. To me, this extra time is worth it because I don’t intent to use these archived files often, so the extra time is worth it to save space. On the other hand, if I were going to email a file to someone, I would use normal level zip compression as it is fast and gives a pretty good ratio.

If you want to get very detailed, you can use different compression formats for different files to maximize storage. Wikipedia has a very good breakdown of the compression ratios of formats versus files.

This is just something to consider as file compression is, basically, used all the time.