Can anyone answer this computer/music question?

I have most of my shows in separate Zip Files. Would I save space on my computer if I Zip multiple Zip Files into a separate Zip file?

In other words....if I have all of my 1972 Stones shows zipped separatley but then put them all in a "1972 Tour" Zip file.....will I save space?

This is not a stupid question. I don't know how to unzip period. Ask it on the main forum. Thanks........

If what you're saying is that you want to put all of your zip files in one folder then compress that folder, it might work out regarding opening some space on your hard drive. If you simply put the zipped files in one folder on your hard drive, they'll still take up the same amount of space they did before, except this time they're all in one folder. A simpler and better solution is to get an external drive that has an USB connection to plug into your computer. This way you can have all of your files in one location and only keep the ones you really want to listen to on your computer hard drive or burned to a disk. This is how I store my files. I found a 250GB portable drive on sale at Best Buy, plugged it into the computer, transferred my files to the external drive, made sure they opened okay by testing a few, then purged the files off of the hard drive. You might also want to experiment with burning the zip files onto a good disk and seeing if they open okay. If they do, then the disk can act as the storage folder for the files. CD-RW disks would be good as you can add new material to the disks. Hope this helps.

Cafaro ......will I save space?

No, maybe very small difference only, but very small..

also to zip compressed music files like mp3 or wma files doesnt save space..

you can do the try very easily.

Before buying an external USB hard disk, please be shure you have USB 2.0 in your ports, cause usb 1.1 is 40 times slower to transfer.
if yor computer is a bit old, maybe is 1.1

Just conducted a little experiment & I was quite surprised with the result. cd1 of Vienna 06 mp3s @ 192 is 95.4meg, a rar file of the same is 94.9meg. Hardly worth the effort.

There are differences between different compression algorithms. Some are slightly more efficient.
However you have to realize that formats such as jpg, or mp3, or pdf already consist of compressed data. So compressing it further usually does not help very much.
The same thing happens when you try to zip several zip-files. It won't help very much.
Compressing is useful for files that contain many repitive patterns. You can see this if you open a .doc file in notepad. Same goes for excel and so on.
Another scenario in which compressing helps is when you have a lot of files that are small ( say < 20Kb ) Putting them all into a big zip file helps because the operating system will allocate by default even for the smallest of files about 32Kb.
( The number differs per OS, or more precisely per filesystem )
In the windows world RAR seems to be very popular, so if you have it, it seems a good idea to stick with it.
A free alternative is here

[sourceforge.net]

Cafaro:

Dmay's suggestion to add an external hard drive is a good idea OR you might want to consider getting a second internal hard drive. Either way, is quite cheap solution. Actually, I'm considering to do the same thing in order to expand the total hard drive capacity of the computer. You won't need to bother with compression utilities if you get a 250 ~ 300 Gigabyte hard drive.


SFTD

Thanks to all. I've already filled up 3 external drives. I'm burning CD/Rs now with stuff that I listen to frequently and keeping stuff that people might want on my laptop and putting things I probay won;t listen to on the external drive.

SFTD....ths is a really dumb-ass question but theoretically, would I lose any of my current stuff on my existing hard drive if I add a second internal drive?
I have most of my work files on this computer.

It seems like a crappy way to spend the summer!

The files on your existing hard drive should be fine if a second drive is installed, though, I would recommend backing up your work files on an external drive anyway just to have backup copies. I lost a few weeks work on a project when the power in the area went off one day while I was working on the computer and I hadn't backed the work up to another storage source. I would also recommend having a computer tech install the drive, along with extra RAM, to help run both drives.

Cafaro:

Adding a second internal drive is simply expanding the total storage capacity of your computer. Your existing files will be unaffected.

Dmay is right about having a computer tech install the drive if you don't feel comfortable about doing it yourself.

Really important files, such as spreadsheets and word documents, should be backed up on either an external USB drive or dare I say, 3.5 inch floppies. You can get a small removable USB drive real cheap to handle those important documents.

Hope that helps.

SFTD

Hi Cafaro,

The big USB drive is an ideal solution as many here point out.
The USB 2.0 story is also absolutely true.
A great thing about USB drives is that you can plug several ones into one port.
Just buy a cable that splits up the port.
Or buy a card that you can plug into your mainboard ( easier than installing a second hard drive ) so that you have extra USB ports.
If I remember well one USB port can carry up to 64 devices ...

A final tip. Back up important data. Burn it onto a DVD or CD, or use whatever. But always back up important data.

Whale Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hi Cafaro,
>
> The big USB drive is an ideal solution as many
> here point out.
> The USB 2.0 story is also absolutely true.
> A great thing about USB drives is that you can
> plug several ones into one port.
> Just buy a cable that splits up the port.
> Or buy a card that you can plug into your
> mainboard ( easier than installing a second hard
> drive ) so that you have extra USB ports.
> If I remember well one USB port can carry up to 64
> devices ...
>
> A final tip. Back up important data. Burn it onto
> a DVD or CD, or use whatever. But always back up
> important data.


If I remember well one USB port can carry up to 64
devices it's 127

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