It’s been a long while since I’ve spent much time thinking about file compression tools, but I was running out of space on one of my smaller SSD’s and the culprit was mainly lots of large multi-GB TIFs and PSDs that had accrued in our Lensley Dropbox.

My first thought was xz, since it compresses super well, but I was growing old waiting for files to compress and decided to switch. lrzip seemed like a good option, and performance was much better than xz, and threaded (and with multi-file support and a nice progress UI to boot), but I also happened on another compressor shoot-out page (if you’re interested in this topic, definitely read this, there’s a lot more testing and nice pros/cons list for the apps) which concluded that lbzip2 was a good choice.

I gave it a spin, and sure enough lbzip2 is great. With defaults, it loses a few percentage points when compressing vs lrzip, but it also compresses on average twice as fast, with the kicker being that its archives are fully cross-compatible with bzip2, so pretty much any system can access the archives by default. I’ll be aliasing bzip2 to lbzip2.

(If speed isn’t as important (batch compression) and for max compression of large files, lrzip is probably better. Although a lot of people have been using xz, even with multithreaded support, I still didn’t feel performance was great so for personal use, I’ll probably end up mostly using lbzip2 or lrzip from now on.)