3 ms·

By compressing multiple (large) files sequentially you'd be able to gradually free some disk space much sooner, and less free space will be needed to write comp

• dahart 9y ago
  True! This could be important if you're running low. I've been curious - does doing something like parallel bzip2 cause more fragmentation than a serial approach, or are the file systems and drives pretty good at dealing with heavy parallel write?
• katastic 9y ago
  Large files / sets of files with 7zip means you can use all files as a dictionary for the compression. (across-file compression, called "solid compression") However, zip does not supports solid compression. Which creates the oddity of zip'ing twice can reduce your file size because multiple duplicate files may have the same compression but they are stored separately (and the second pass then notices the similarity). The downside of solid compression is you have to extract any files related to that block. But with modern computers that's not as bad as it used to be, and modern 7zip doesn't extract "all" files, only the ones affected by that block.