If a .zip file contains all of the information of the original, just in less space, why does it have to be unzipped to access any of it?

Question

If a .zip file contains all of the information of the original, just in less space, why does it have to be unzipped to access any of it?

In: 1276

Answer 1

You sort of can. For instance in Windows, you can compress your drives which essentially zips up every file on the drive, but when you want to read that file or a program beads to load it, the file system has to uncompress it on the fly to provide to the program.

Basically it’s way slower than just reading the uncompressed file.