Just want to check out the data and skip the story? Check it out at Josh47.com

The Surprise

One day, while perusing a menu in File Explorer, I realized Compress To had options now!

Around this time, the Josh47 project started doing a much better job making regular backups, and also began offering file server services and media backup services to select individuals, meaning that the size and volume of the data I was wrangling on the self-hosted servers in Washington ballooned up by terabytes. Regularly backing up terabytes of data by hand initially proved challenging, so I ended up automating most of it with Kopia, which has served my needs quite well.

Kopia’s documentation provides a table showing comparison of various compression methods they support (with zstd-best-compresson being the most compressed, which was the same as I found in my data), but my curiosity remained, so what did I do? I took one of the things I still back up manually (in addition to automatically with Kopia) — the Supercraft Server’s world — and compressed it using 27 different compression options and put all the data in a table for easy analysis.

Interested in checking out the data and findings? Take a look here!