Evaluating the Efficiency of Lossless Compression Algorithms across Multiple Formats in Archival Compression

Data storage or retention is an essential part of all business operations. Modern companies opt to store user data seven years or more after it is deleted and even longer when it’s still being hosted. Therefore, when storing files for long periods of time compression becomes an essential step in reducing cost and total file storage. Compression is the strategic removement of portions of data while ensuring that enough data is left behind to reconstruct the file during decompression. This experiment seeks to identify potential benefits of compression in groups of files of differing formats in comparison to individual file compression in hopes to identify cost savings for long term file storage. To access the performance of archival compression algorithms in this experiment a compression of all files individually was done to find a base line. The experiment looked at both compression time and compression ratio as measures of efficiency. Then both single format compression and mixed format compression were tested. This compared the efficiency of compressing the individual formats against the efficiency of multiple format compression. Results indicated that there is little to no benefit in compressing mixed format files into one archival algorithm.