Title basically says it all. I understand how photos and videos can trade quality for file size, but files like games or large folders can be shrunk into a .rar or .zip file, transferred, and pulled back out with no loss to functionality. How does that work? If nothing’s being taken away how is space being saved?
In: Technology
Lots of good answers here already. I just want to add that you can see for yourself lossless compression does not always work. Create a text file with say 5000 characters of random text – ideally truly random (which isn’t easy to do by hand), but you can experiment with just mashing the keyboard. Zip it up. Now make a file with 5000 characters from real content (like a Wikipedia article). You will see that usually, the real content zips to a much smaller size than the random content.
When there’s no pattern in the data, you can’t compress it.
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