What compression method?
 

As the title says what compression method should I use to get from 10.4 GB two 4.1 GB files.
More exact: I got 6 folders in total of 10.4GB I want to compress them in two 4.1GB files.
I've got the following options: gzip-tar, lzop-tar, compressed-tar, bzip2-tar, tar, LHA, Zip, jawa, gzip, bzip, bzip2, rar, 7zip! All of them using Ark.
Which one of the should I use?
THX in advance for a quick reply!

From what I hear 7zip has good compression rates, but how small you will be able to make them depends largely on what you're compressing. For example, text files compress very well, whereas jpegs compress very poorly.

there are mostly program files

What's a program file? A binary? A text configuration file?

One way to see which is best is probably to just have a go and see what you get. There are various options for the respective archivers which generate higher compression rates. See each one's man page for more information.

As for making two separate archives each 4.1GB in size, that may be part of the archiver's abilities (again, see the man pages), otherwise you can pipe the output into split which splits files into a chosen size, after which they can be joined again using cat.

mostly binary files (about 90%)... I guess I'm gonna try a few off them... first off all 7zip to see what can I do whit that...
THX for the hints