Either of the Stuffit options should be good.

Dropstuff was just an easy way to access Stuffit (an icon you drop files on and it ran stuffit on them). Since you're supposed to be using dropstuff, make sure you're producing a .sit file - stuffit can happily produce other stuff as well.

If your using OS X, you should be using Stuffit v 10+. I've had earlier versions damage my OS X files.
You're probably already done though.

Honestly, I'd zip the files. That seems to have become more of a cross-platform standard, for those not running the full version of Stuffit. I rarely use Stuffit anymore, I just use the Mac OS X zip format.

Then again, as doubting thomas stated, you're probably already done.

Not done at all!

I left about a quarter of it stuffing overnight. When I left it said it had about 400 hours worth of stuffing to do, but I really hope that's incorrect because I don't have 400 hours of computer free time. Hopefully what I've stuffed will be done overnight...

I really should do a test to see which format makes it the smallest. Then at least I will save time on burning DVDs.

Stuffit will usually produce a smaller file than Zip, though it will take much longer to compress.

Tar isn't a compression format at all - it's an archive format. That is, it takes a bunch of files and makes them into one file. It's usually combined with zip compression then, to make a .tgz - that is tar, gzipped file (where gzip is a common open source zip program).

Rar, bzip and Ace are also compression formats that get better compression ratios (albeit again slower) than zip. I don't remember seeing any rar or ace programs for Macs, though - but I'd guess there must be some. Bzip is another open source one, so you can certainly get it for Macs.

That's about all the general purpose compression software in common use at the moment, though there are plenty of more obscure ones.

there is a rar program unrarx but there others just google mac rar

100g buda phew

i would look for a image compression instead

Different size file, find you, with different type of files, when you compress. Best compress, this terminal app called. Will find your smallest file size it will. Unwise is he who uses it on 100GB.


#!/bin/sh

# bestcompress - given a file, try compressing it with all the available
# compression tools and keep the compressed file that's smallest, reporting
# the result to the user. If '-a' isn't specified, it skips compressed
# files in the input stream.

Z="compress"
gz="gzip"
bz="bzip2"
Zout="/tmp/bestcompress.$$.Z"
gzout="/tmp/bestcompress.$$.gz"
bzout="/tmp/bestcompress.$$.bz"
skipcompressed=1

if [ "$1" = "-a" ] ; then
skipcompressed=0 ; shift
fi

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 [-a] file or files to optimally compress" >&2; exit 1
fi

trap "/bin/rm -f $Zout $gzout $bzout" EXIT

for name
do
if [ ! -f "$name" ] ; then
echo "$0: file $name not found. Skipped." >&2
continue
fi

if [ "$(echo $name | egrep '(\.Z$|\.gz$|\.bz2$)')" != "" ] ; then
if [ $skipcompressed -eq 1 ] ; then
echo "Skipped file ${name}: it's already compressed."
continue
else
echo "Warning: Trying to double-compress $name"
fi
fi

$Z < "$name" > $Zout &
$gz < "$name" > $gzout &
$bz < "$name" > $bzout &

wait # run compressions in parallel for speed. Wait until all are done

smallest="$(ls -l "$name" $Zout $gzout $bzout | \
awk '{print $5"="NR}' | sort -n | cut -d= -f2 | head -1)"

case "$smallest" in
1 ) echo "No space savings by compressing $name. Left as-is."
;;
2 ) echo Best compression is with compress. File renamed ${name}.Z
mv $Zout "${name}.Z" ; rm -f "$name"
;;
3 ) echo Best compression is with gzip. File renamed ${name}.gz
mv $gzout "${name}.gz" ; rm -f "$name"
;;
4 ) echo Best compression is with bzip2. File renamed ${name}.bz2
mv $bzout "${name}.bz2" ; rm -f "$name"
esac

done

exit 0

whoa. yoda does unix. why does that not surprise me?

Ha!

Bash scripting is a bit like using the force, only you've got no Jedi mind trick to use on chicks.