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SQX format for compression

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imtrobin:
Hi,

I recently came to know about the sqx format (Squeez from the recent archive compression review)

http://www.speedproject.de/enu/squeez/

Upon some testing, the format does offer compression slightly better as the latest rar 3.0. However, I don't see this format being used widely as rar. I'm contemplating to switch my archives to that format, so I'm a little concerned about its stability (corruption and recovery).

Is there anyone using this format to store their files? Care to comment?

Carol Haynes:
I have moved to Sqeeze for all of my compression stuff now since it natively supports almost everything and is easy to use.

One of the nice things is built in SE support, and also SQX and RAR can have recovery records added which makes it feel secure.

I haven't had an SQX file go bad so I can't really comment on the strength of the recovery record method.

imtrobin:
The rar format is an older version which only uses 1MB dictionary = lousier compression. Squeez developers cannot use the latest rar version with 4MB dictionary because they claim it infriges on some patent.

I stored using zips before, they can get corrupted. So now comtemplating between sqx or rar. Rar seems to be more widely used.

Carol Haynes:
RAR is more widely used (but nowhere near as widely as ZIP).

Can't really see the problem with using SQX since they are easy to make self extracting.

Innuendo:
SQX is a non-standard file compression format. If the files you are compressing are never going to leave your hard drive I guess it's fine to use, but if you are ever going to send one of those archives to a friend you're either going to need to convert it to something standard or burden your friend with having to go download an odd-ball compression program they'll probably never use again. I guess you could make all of your archives on your hard drive self-extracting, but that adds overhead to the file size because of the extraction code that must be added to every file & then you are defeating the purpose of going with the more efficient compression program in the first place.

On the WWW Zip is the most widely used format. On P2P you'll only see Zip & RAR with RAR outnumbering Zips. On Usenet all you'll see is RAR.

Regarding the RAR support. RAR Labs does not & never has licensed the code to create RAR archives. This joker reverse-engineered WinRAR v1.x in order to add RAR creation support to his program. This is a direct violation of the WinRAR EULA. Only reason he doesn't have support for the latest RAR format is because he's not smart enough to reverse-engineer the latest versions (Eugene beefed up the program's protection).

If you want to support a pinhead who violates software EULAs and goes against the wishes of other software developers when it comes to  their intellectual property that's your business, but I won't be using any of this dill weed's programs.

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