How to Select a File Compression Program

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Eric White. We're going to talk about how to select a file compression program. So I'm assuming that you have some files that you need to transport in some way. Either you're going to FTP them somewhere or you're trying to fit them all onto a CD or floppy disk. But they just, they're just a little bit too big to it on the disk or the bigger file sizes are undesirable for FTP because if it fails in the middle and auto-resume doesn't work, you've got to start from scratch and it's just, it's a big pain. That's why we have file compression utilities. Another reason is if you're going to back, back up lots of files onto a file server you want to take up as little space as possible. So you'll compress the files and then move them to the file server. There are three major brands of file compression utilities that that I've used through out my career. One is called WinZip, WinRAR and one is called PKZip. Any of the three will work. WinZip is probably the most popular of the file compression utilities, it's the most well known. WinRAR has become much more well known over the, over the last five years or so. There really isn't much difference between the three. You select the file that you want to compress. In Windows you just right click the file and say send it to Zip or send it to WinRAR or send it to PKZip, and it compresses it for you. There's pretty much all there is to that. What really comes into play is how easy it is for you to use. I have found WinRAR easier to use than WinZip but others think WinZip is the easiest. And others still enjoy PKZip. You can get PKZip at www.pkware.com. You can WinZip at www.winzip.com. Those are the main points in discovering which compression utility works best for you."