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Those with limited hard drive or for faster file transfers, compressing files may be a suitable alternative. Letters and words often appear together in the same pattern. This is where file compression takes charge. Because of high rate of redundancy makes compression is possible with different types of files. Making file transfers less time-consuming but it can also save your hard drive space.

Text files is very good at compression at reduction of 50 percent or more for each compression process.Most programming languages are also very redundant because they use a relatively small collection of commands and frequently go together in a set pattern. Files with a lot of unique information such as graphics and MP3 files cannot be compressed much with this system because lack of repetition patterns.

Algorithm used in compression program play the most important key in file compressions.Some programs are suited to picking up patterns in certain types of files and compress them more efficient. Others have dictionaries within dictionaries, which might compress efficiently for larger files but not for smaller ones.

All compression programs work with the same basic idea there is actually a good deal of variation in the manner of execution. Programmers are always trying to build a better system.

File Formats

Common compressed files are those with extensions like .zip, .sit and .tar. These extensions represent popular compression formats for the PC, Macintosh, and UNIX. They may be single files or groups of files that have been bundled together into a single archive. An archive file can sometimes contain video or graphics files within it and often contains software programs with related documentation.

How it works

File compression is like a computer shorthand. When you attempt to compress a file, the compression software that is used looks for a series of repeating characters or bits in the file. The software then replaces these blocks of repeated characters with symbols or shorter words or phrases which are called “tokens.”

For example, it takes less space for a computer file to be structured:

“10101000110101[insert 73 zeroes here]11011010010″

than this…

“1010100011010100000000000000000000000000000000000

000000000000000000000000000000000000011011010010″

When you apply a decompression program to a compressed file, the software reads the file and replaces the tokens with the original data, inflating the file back to its original size.