this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2025
415 points (98.4% liked)
iiiiiiitttttttttttt
1320 readers
206 users here now
you know the computer thing is it plugged in?
A community for memes and posts about tech and IT related rage.
founded 6 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Well, yeah. The real advantage is only having a single file to transfer, makes eg. SFTP a lot less annoying at the command line.
Lossless compression works by storing redundant information more efficiently. If you've got 50 GB in a directory, it's going to be mostly pictures and videos, because that would be an incredible amount of text or source code. Those are already stored with lossy compression, so there's just not much more you can squeeze out.
I suppose you might have 50 GB of logs, especially if you've a logserver for your network? But most modern logging stores in a binary format, since it's quicker to search and manipulate, and doesn't use up such a crazy amount of disk space.
I actually just switched a backup script of mine from using a tar.gz to just a regular tar file. It's a little bigger but overall, the process is so much faster I don't even care about the tiny extra bit of compression (100gb vs 120gb transferred over a 1gbit connection). The entire reason I do this is, like you said, transferring files over the Internet is a billion times faster as one file, BUT you don't need the gzip step just for that
Meh, that barely fits an empty MS Word doc...
/s
Can we transcribe it to a QR code?