While gzip is the standard Unix tool when it comes to compression, there are other tools available and some of them are performing better than gzip in terms of compression ratio.

LZMA is an improved version of famous LZ77 compression algorithm. It was improved in way of maximum increasing of compression ratio, keeping high decompression speed and low memory requirements for decompressing. lzma command line tool has a similar interface to gzip(1) and bzip2(1) and is intended to make use of LZMA compression easy for the users who are already familiar with gzip and bzip2.

Earlier this month we delivered benchmarks comparing the ZFS, EXT4, and Btrfs file-systems from both solid-state drives and hard drives. In this article we have our Btrfs test results when the zlib compression mount option was enabled for looking at the SSD compression performance.

With the number of CPU cores in desktop machines moving from two to four and soon eight, the ability to execute computationally expensive tasks in parallel is becoming more important. The mgzip tools that can take advantage of multiple CPU cores during file compression, while pbzip2 uses multiple cores for both compression and decompression.

Bluecherry released an open source driver for version 2 of its Linux-based compression card for MPEG-4 digital video recording. Redesigned around the Linux kernel's API for Video (Video4Linux) and Audio (ALSA), the GPL-licensed driver primarily targets the Bluecherry compression cards and related Ubuntu-based video surveillance software, but can be used for a variety of video applications.

As storage space becomes cheaper, there's a growing trend to save digital music files in a lossless format. Such lossless formats provide an exact replication of the audio quality found in the original content, usually on CD. The resulting files are also much larger, when compared to MP3 or AAC at 128kbps or 256kpbs.

Although the dd command is a great option for creating images of partitions, it creates a bit-by-bit copy so that it also copies empty space, making your partition large and slow to create. Partimage has the advantage of only copying your data to the image.

"...The goal of EXI is to provide an encoding of an XML document, along with an additional compression technique..."

If you need an archiving program that can run under both Windows and Linux, sport a graphical interface, and be licensed as open source software, only a single program will do: PeaZip. It acts as a graphical front end for several tools that provide archiving, compression, encryption, and similar functions.