Uncompressed file: 1'029'744 bytes.

Compressed size (excluding Zip or 7z archive metadata; data is not preprocessed):

Conclusion: the Zip-Ada (current research branch) compresses that data 17.3% better than 7-Zip v.21.02!

The file (zipped to its smallest compressed size, 4.05%) can be downloaded here. It is part of the old Canterbury corpus benchmark file collection (file name: kennedy.xls).

Please don't draw any conclusion: the test data is a relatively small, special binary file with lots of redundancy.
But that result is a hint that some more juice can be extracted from the LZMA format.

The open-source Zip-Ada project can be found here and here.

A rare case where Zip-Ada's LZMA encoder is much better than LZMA SDK's. Rare but still interesting, and with standard LZMA parameters (no specific tuning for that file):

The compressed size with current revision (rev.#882) of Zip-Ada is slightly worse (42,559 bytes).

The file is part of the classic Canterbury Corpus compression benchmark data set.

New release (2.40) of AZip.

The long-awaited Windows Explorer integration is there:

Context menu for a file

Context menu for a folder

This integration is activated upon installation or on demand via the Manage button:

Configuration

This new version is based on the Zip-Ada library v.57 and includes its recent developments.

Enjoy!

Audacity is a free, open source, audio editor, available here.

If you want to backup you Audacity project, you can manually do it with "Save Lossless Copy of Project..." with the name, say, X, which will create X.aup (project file), a folder X_data, and, in there, a file called "Audio Track.wav".

Some drawbacks:

• It is a manual operation.
• It is blocked during playback.
• Envelopes are applied to the "Audio Track.wav" data. So data is altered and no more a real lossless copy of the project. Actually this operation is something between a backup and an export of the project to a foreign format.

A solution: Zip-Ada.

The latest commit (rev. 796) adds to the Preselection method a specific configuration for detecting Audacity files, so they are compressed better than with default settings.

Funny detail: that configuration makes, in most cases, the compression better than the best available compression with 7-Zip (v.19.00, "ultra" mode, .7z archive).

The compressing process is also around twice as fast as 7-Zip in "ultra" mode. This is no magic, since the "LZ" part of the LZMA compression scheme spends less time finding matches, in the chosen configuration for Zip-Ada.

A backup script could look like this (here for Windows' cmd):

rem --------------------------
rem Nice date YYYY-MM-DD_HH.MM
rem --------------------------

set year=%date:~-4,4%

set month=%date:~-7,2%
if "%month:~0,1%" equ " " set month=0%month:~1,1%

set day=%date:~-10,2%
if "%day:~0,1%" equ " " set day=0%day:~1,1%

set hour=%time:~0,2%
if "%hour:~0,1%" equ " " set hour=0%hour:~1,1%

set min=%time:~3,2%

set nice_date=%year%-%month%-%day%_%hour%.%min%

rem --------------------------

set audacity_project=The Cure - A Forest

zipada -ep2 "%audacity_project%_%nice_date%" "%audacity_project%.aup" "%audacity_project%_data\e08\d08\*.au"

You want to copy your Thunderbird profile from machine A to machine B (with all mail accounts, passwords, settings, feeds, newgroups, ...) ? Actually it is very easy. From the user storage (on Windows, %appdata% (you get there with Windows key+R and typing %appdata%)), you copy the entire Thunderbird folder of machine A to the equivalent location on machine B, and that's it. The new active profile will be automatically selected since the file profiles.ini will be overwritten on the way.

Now, if you want or need to use a cloud drive or a USB stick for the operation, it's better to wrap everything in a Zip file (a single file instead of hundreds) to save time. Plus, you can store the Zip file in case of an emergency (losing data on both A and B machines).

With AZip, it's pretty easy: 

• Shut down Thunderbird on both machines.
• On machine A: drag & drop the Thunderbird folder on an empty AZip window.
• Copy or move the Zip file.
• On machine B: extract everything with another drag & drop, from AZip to the Explorer window with the %appdata% path. When asked "Use archive's folder names for output", say "Yes". When asked "Do you want to replace this file ?", say "All".

That's it!

Here a few screenshots:

Folder tree view - click to enlarge

After recompression - click to enlarge