So I decided that my DS roms finally needs a bit of a tidying up. Some of them were grabbed from sites that have gone while some have been packed according to scene release standards. The problem is that the external HDD is starting to run out of space to hold them so I thought it's about time to repack them to see if I can save space. My only question is, out of RAR, ZIP and 7Z, which format should I choose?

 

I would use RAR personally, but it's pretty much a preference thing.

RAR deals better with data and transmission errors than ZIPs, but 7z has a slightly better compression rate than RAR

WinRar can decompress them all, though.

 

Zip for 2 reasons:

1) NDScrc can repack all of your ROMS into a ZIP archive, taking out all the effort. Even renames the NDS and archive too.

2) Windows has built in support for opening ZIP files which is handy if you want to give them to a 'friend'

I still use WinRar for handling ZIP files though.

 

.7Z for me. I prefer having the smallest possible files, because I really need all the space I can get on my hard drive (and yes, I have an external hard drive too, but it's always a hassle using it)

Also, how come you have such a high postcount and I have never seen you before?

 

Not all all.

Compressing them saves more space, and leaves the original ROM untouched. You can then trim the ROMS as you copy them to your MicroSD card.

On average you might save ~20% from trimming, on average you will normally save ~50% from archiving.

 

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you'd have to uncompress everything first to take benefit of clones in .7z. I doubt you will be able to get anything better than 1% compression rate if you take all your rars and zips and compress them in .7z.

why not buy a bigger hard drive, how big could it possibly be? 120 gigs or so? that isn't a lot of space. 1tb hard drives are $50 these days.

 

I have archived 4 * 7.4GB archives full of trimmed ROMS (backups of my Nieces'/ Nephew's/ Sister's MicroSD cards), each of which contains 200-230 ROMs. Even though the ROMs within are trimmed, the archives are all compressed down to 3.83GB - 3.98GB.

Perhaps on an individual ROM which trims well it might come within 10%. But on average over quite a few ROMs, there's no way trimming comes within 10% of archiving.

 

Used to post a lot during college years but now I moved towards being a lurker.

 

Definitely .RAR, they have never failed me