This week we continue comparing the venerable Stuffit Expander we’ve all come to know and love with the “new kid on the block” (at least by Mac standards) - the Zip compression format built into Mac OS X. There are basically two reasons your basic consumer computer user these days would ever want or need to compress a file. They are, as best I can tell, to “shrink” a file attached to an email message so the message will take less time to send and receive; and, to knock down a file’s size enough to fit on a floppy (aargh!) or CD or DVD for backup and storage.

So now you’re asking, “Wait a minute! What about being a good steward of my hard drive space and “zipping” or “stuffing” files to free up space on my drive on an everyday basis?”

Ah, Grasshopper (an oblique old TV show reference at best, but, what the hey). Anyway, you certainly can save some disk space by compressing files that you don’t use all the time. The question is, how much space are you really saving versus the “hassle quotient” of decompressing and then recompressing. Plus, with today’s low price-per-gigabyte ratio, unless you’re heavy into photos, video, or illegally downloading every song ever recorded, you probably have more hard drive space than you can fill anyway.

Some file formats are compressed more efficiently than others. For example, specifically for this article (my commitment to you, dear reader, knows no bounds) I zipped and stuffed a 69.7 MB QuickTime movie. Turns out that the zipped file shrunk all the way to 69.6 MB (that’s less than two-tenths of one percent hard drive space gain, if you’re doing the math – and I know some of you are). Interestingly, the same QuickTime movie compressed with Stuffit’s Drop Stuff utility resulted in a file actually larger (by about 100 kilobytes) than the original. This is in part due to some “overhead” code created during the process that provides added functionality later (if you’re decompressing with Stuffit Deluxe, which will set you back $79). We’ll get into those features next time.

So, now for your homework assignment. Try zipping and stuffing different kinds of files and folders, see which formats get compressed the most, and we’ll compare notes next time.

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski