On Tue, 22 Jan 2008, Dan Armbrust wrote: > Plus, in practice, most of my big files that take up tons of space > aren't compressable anyway. Yep. I thought maybe my raw video files from my digital camera would compress well, but that did not happen. With gzip, they only reduced in size by a few percent -- not even worth the time and effort. I'm sure most ordinary video compresses even less than that. The situation is the same with most image data and most audio data. Exceptions would be .bmp files and probably .wav. The thing that really compresses massively is a big text file, especially with a lot of repetition in it. This could include log files, statistical data, and postscript files. Most of the time when a large file will be produced by some program, the program has already been designed to store the output in a compressed form. Mike