How can I compress large folders?

Question

How can I compress large folders?

I've tried several apps so far and nothing works. I have a bunch of folders that I need to transfer online and they're size (based on contents) ranges from 2GB to 30GB.

I've tried Mac OS's default compression. It begins to compress and spends a while doing so but never finishes. At some point the compression window simply goes blank and there's no way for me to close it. The only way to get rid of the window is to restart the computer or start compressing another file (which for some reason refreshes the desktop and immediately creates an incomplete/faulty compressed file).

I've tried Winzip yet received error messages.

I tried iZip and after 1 hour and a half of archiving one folder into a zip file it simply quit unexpectedly.

Is there no software that can handle this task?

MacBook Pro, macOS Sierra (10.12.3)

Posted on Oct 14, 2018 8:02 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,210 points

Oct 14, 2018 8:19 AM in response to Mroksalmarer513

I don't know why it is failing, but many files are already compressed. You can't compress them further.

Most image, video, and audio files are compressed already. About the only thing you can compress with any significant reduction are text files, and some PDFs.

Is there enough space where you are compressing them? You are essentially duplicating the folders, so you will need nearly as much space as you are trying to compress.

Reply

Answer 2

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,210 points

Oct 14, 2018 9:03 AM in response to Mroksalmarer513

I don't know for sure, but I don't thing WAV is a compressed format. MP3 is already compressed. I imagine the rest of the project files are compressible.

Have you tried compressing them from the command line? You can use zip, gzip, or tar. Not sure if there are more already installed.

It seems if all of the programs are failing, perhaps there is a problem with something in the folders. Or, they could all use the same background process to compress the files (like zip in Terminal).

Reply

Answer 3

Oct 15, 2018 1:08 AM in response to leroydouglas

Wetransfer

Reply

Answer 4

Oct 14, 2018 8:31 AM in response to Barney-15E

Hey thanks Barney,

These files are almost exclusively audio files. MP3, WAV, MIDI, as well as whatever files make up music projects (Cubase and Pro Tools). I'm quite sure that these can be compressed because some of the folders are already compressed into RAR files. For example, one of the RAR files is 230MB, and when unpack it it gives me a folder with over 3GB worth of contents. The other RAR files are also much smaller than the size of the folders they unpack into.

Reply