# compressing files to half?



## lulumara (Jun 22, 2009)

Hi, want to know if there's a program that can compress files to half such as 8.0Gb of files  to maybe 4.5 or less Gb so i can burn it to DVD-R(4.7GB space )?ZIP and rar can't  do that though? Any ideas?


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## tremmor (Jun 22, 2009)

zip and rar is about as good as it gets. Txt files compress but pictures and files dont. If i was going to compress a dvd size i would consider recreating recovery files with something like quickpar so you don't loose it. 
good question though. i do not know of anything.


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## mrjack (Jun 22, 2009)

I've been interested in compressing files as well, for making backups in case of hard drive failure. The best I've found is UHARC, which is text-based but WinUHA gives a graphical user interface. I've seen figures of UHARC compressing files to about 20% of the original size.


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## Aastii (Jun 22, 2009)

There are quite a few, but i can't name them or tell you them, i just know they are there.

If you do a virus scan with some virus scanners you will see that sometimes you get errors afterwards saying couldn't scan <file> because it is a compression bomb and this is a file that has had several compressions and if it unpacked it to scan it it would crash. 

There was a thread in the avast! forums about one and someone was saying how someone on the forum had managed to get a 200GB folder and make it 20mb or so because they had compressed it with lots and lots and lots of different programs. It was an admin that postted it, so i am thinking it is pretty legit, but still boggles me that the files would still be usable afterwards 

I know that doesn't give help, but it lets you know it is possible.

There is also a way that you can make your files sinto several .rar files and they are all the same thing, so you could have say file-1, fiel-2, file-3 etc all the way up to files-40 for example, each on say 40mb and they all have part of the same file/folder. When you extract one, it would know that each contained a little part and extract them all, so you would have the file/folder in several different .rar files, as soon as you unrar one, it unrars the all and puts them together. That way you could use one or two DVDs and then put it all back together when you have the stuff where you want it


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## lulumara (Jun 22, 2009)

What's UHARC and  WinUHA stand for? Is it only 20% only will be compress it's the same as RAR and Winzip right? Aasti you can pm me if you can tell me the name if forum can't allow to name it.Thanks for responding. I just don't want my hard drive be fill up or been almost full.


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## mrjack (Jun 22, 2009)

UHarc is a tool designed for compression of files and is one of the more effective ones. The size of the compressed file can be as low as 20% of the original, but it depends on the settings. And depending on the settings, it may take a long time to compress and decompress.

UHarc is the tool itself, the interface is purely text-based. WinUHA gives it a graphical interface, which is simpler to use. But besides that, they're pretty much identical.



Aastii said:


> There was a thread in the avast! forums about one and someone was saying how someone on the forum had managed to get a 200GB folder and make it 20mb or so because they had compressed it with lots and lots and lots of different programs. It was an admin that postted it, so i am thinking it is pretty legit, but still boggles me that the files would still be usable afterwards



A friend from school, who is very experienced with everything to do with computers, is also able to do similar things. He compressed another friends' hard drive to below 64Mb, and we're talking about 200-300Gb worth of data compressed to less than 64Mb.


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## Shane (Jun 22, 2009)

UHarc like mentioned is amazing,I think you should give that a try 

I just wish more people would compress huge files and game demos with these so they download faster.


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