Remember when it was a big deal if you chose .zip, .rar, or 7z, etc? Now we all have so much bandwidth it doesn't matter.

Willy@sh.itjust.works to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 223 points –
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Nowadays it matters if you use a compression algorithm that can utilize multiple cores for packing/unpacking larger data. For a multiple GB archive that can be the difference between "I'll grab a coffee until this is ready" or "I'll go for lunch and hope it is done when I come back"

In that case, which file type would you recommend?

I personally prefer bzip2 - but it needs to be packed with pbzip, not the regular bzip to generate archives that can be extracted on multiple cores. Not a good option if you have to think about Windows users, though.

Ah I have to use Windows for work and that's the source of most of my compression needs. Thanks for the info though, I'll look into this