Has anyone ever seen the website where they hold a group of 4MB files (I think) that totals to a few TERABYTES that they managed to compress down to like 12kilobytes or something? I know it exists and a friend is severely doubting me I just need that link!

Thanks

I don't have the link, but I'm with your friend on this one... Something smells fishy. If this were a legitimate, lossless compression scheme that worked on general data, it would revolutionize everything. If you find the website again, look for details about this data. I would guess it's a specialized compression format for specialized data. Here's a classic example:

Run-length encoding: you look at a file, count the number of bits in sequence that are the same (either a sequence of 1's or a sequence of 0's). Then, write how long that sequence goes for instead of the sequence itself. In other words, something like this:

This compression scheme isn't so good for general data, but I could make a file that caters to the format. Imagine a set of files that total 4TB worth of 0's. With run-length encoding, all of those files could be compressed to a file 6 bytes in size. For me to claim I have a compression scheme that reduces 4TB of data into 6 bytes is misleading at best.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but the devil is in the details. Snoop around that site if you ever find it again.

Yea I know it sounds really buggered, but like all the files inside are the same, and they have done it like "a zip of zips inside a zip of zips ....... ", it recurses for a long time. It's hard to find the page as I can't remember any exact words off the page that would come up in google! Heh.

Try to zip a zip file, you won't get any more compression, unless possibly for things like image and audio files. But for documents, once it's compressed, it'll stay that size, and you might end up just increasing the size because you'd have to have double the information about what to decompress.