Today I ran a test to see which is the best way to compress Delphi projects for backup/archive purposes.
The contestants are Zip, WinRAR (v7.01) and 7Zip (v24.08).
I expected WinRar to be the winner in all cases (as usual) but for plain text files (PAS), the results were surprising. 7Zip won!
TEXT COMPRESSION
Original size: 14,986,000 bytes
| Compressor | Size (bytes) | Time (sec) |
| 7 Zip | 2,288,000 | 4 |
| Zip | 5,967,000 | 25 |
| Rar | 5,802,000 | 3 |
BINARY COMPRESSION
7 Zip won also when compressing DocX files (which are binary files):
Original size: 61,211,000 bytes
| Compressor | Size after compression (bytes) | Time (sec) |
| 7 Zip | 48,646,000 | 8 |
| Zip | 59,671,000 | 5 |
| WinRar | 59,698,000 | 18 |
It is true that 7Zip is not as polished as WinRar. Actually its GUI is quite crappy. But hey! WinRar costs money, while 7Zip is free. The only thing that is holding me from switching to 7Zip is that it is made in Russia.