Files take up a lot of room and depending on what kind they are, they may take up more or less room than others. Video files are huge and photo files are very large. Some document files or spreadsheet files can take up a lot of room as well. But there is a way around the file space situation:  compression.

About File Compression

File compression is just what it sounds like:  you are compressing a file to get it smaller. Files have blank spaces in them and when you compress a file you, in effect, just squeeze the blank spaces and extra room in a file down to almost nothing. There are several different types of compressed files, the most common being .zip (hence ‘zipping’ a file), .jar, .7Z, and .rar. Each compression algorithm is a little different; they may do things a little differently, but they all get to the same place in the end–a smaller file or set of files.

Adding to an archive

Compressing, or archiving, files is often a good idea before sending several at a time over the Internet, or before backing them up. You can add as many files to an archive as you want, and you can also add additional files once you have started an archive. For example, if you want to compress certain files and save them on a daily basis (sales figures for example) then each day you can just add that day’s files to the archive without having to start over.

How to Compress Files

There are several different file compression utilities, like WinZip, WinRar, 7Zip, and ALZip, some free, some not. But they all work basically the same way if you want to compress a file and make it smaller. When compressing a file, you are adding it to an ‘archive’ so don’t let the terminology throw you off.

1. Open the program (in this case ALZip, which is free)
2. Go to New Archive
3. Find and click on the file you want to compress
4. Give the new archive (file) a name
5. Then click Add and you will see the program start to work

When it finishes, you can see the new size versus the old size; we just did a .bmp file for this example and it went from just under 15 million bytes to just over 5 million bytes! You can imagine how much room you will save by zipping and compressing certain files. Understand, though, that most files cannot be used when they are compressed; they have to be Extracted first. It’s just the reverse of the zipping process.

So you can save yourself some room by compressing, or zipping your files.