Why isn't everyone using .7z ?
Showerthoughts
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
Because gzip and bz2 exists. 7z is almost always a plugin or addon, or extra application. While the first two work out of the box pretty much everywhere. It also depends on frequency of access, frequency of addendum, size, type of data, etc. If you have an archive that you have to add new files frequently, 7z is gonna start grating on you with the compression times. But it is Ok if you are going to extract very frequently from an archive that will never change. While gz and bz2 are overall the “good enough at every use case” format.
For archiving/backupping *NIX files, tar.whatever still wins as it preserves permissions while 7z, zip and rar don't
Oh, and while 7z is FOSS and supported out of the box on most Linux desktop OSes and on macOS, Windows users will complain they need to install stuff to open your zip. Somehow, tar.gz is supported out of the box on Linux, macOS, and yes Windows 10 and 11!
Just reserve your dislike for the ones still doing .bin, .img, and .cue.
1:1 copies of the bits on the disc is a valid option that some people prefer. Especially if you want to make your own physical disc or make compressed files encoded in a very specific way. It's also the most reliable way to archive a disc for long-term storage.
For a few hundred kilobyte file sure, the difference is like pocket change. For a larger one you'd choose the right tool for the job though, especially for things like a split archive or a database.
Username checks out! Also you're absolutely right, just last month I was looking for the best compression algorithm/packages to archive a 70gb DB
What did you find?
I ended up with xz. According to this page it's the one with the best compression ratio. It's also the slowest but since it was one off I didn't mind about it.