We had to deal with small storage devices for years. Most people don’t remember when we were limited to hard drive space. My first hard drive was 80 MB and I had to save forever, it cost me almost $300.00. But I was the talk of our computer circles. Everyone wanted to see my new drive; they could not believe when they saw the 80 MB on the label.

Since many people were limited we had to conserve what little space people had. This was done by compressing most file sizes. The first program I remember that did this was call zipper. We would use this at a DOS command window. You would place all of your files into one directory and then change to that directory from the command line. Once there you would issue the command “zip c:/myfiles”, then hit enter and watch as they zipped.

In today’s world we now have large hard drives that will hold what seems like unlimited files of unlimited size. But there are still compressing tools. Today’s tools come with your computer and are much easier to use.

On the Mac is the Archiver. It is easy to add files to a compressed package and it is just as easy to uncompress files that may have been sent to you. On Windows there is the compressor. Easy enough to use; select a group of files and right click on them and click on add to compressed file. You give it a name and off it goes doing it’s magic.

The main reason I see people using compression today is to allow the emailing of large files. Mostly pictures because they are so large these days with the high mega pixels.

If you have never used a compression program on your computer try it today. I compress large folders of pictures to put them on my backup drive. It uses less space and allows me to store large groups of archived pictures together.