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New V11 Compression Features
SyncBack V11 includes many feature suggestions and change requests. One feature we improved was compression. V11.2.5.0 introduced support for XZ and Zstandard compression and an option to not waste time trying to further compress already compressed files.
XZ compression is essentially the same as LZMA2 but uses a different compression engine. XZ and LZMA2 have the worst performance but the best compression. However, keep in mind that with multi-zip compression you can configure your SyncBack profile to use multiple threads for the compression (see Compression -> Advanced when modifying your profile) which can greatly improve performance.
Zstandard is a high-speed compression algorithm created by Facebook. If you do not use a high compression level (i.e. choose level 5 or lower), then it is very fast compared with other compression methods.
We have an article online that explains the different compression methods. There is also a Knowledge Base article that compares their performance.
Note that XZ and ZStandard can only be used with multi-zip compression, i.e. each file is individually compressed, and is not available in SyncBackFree.
Another compression feature included in V11 was the option to detect if a file is compressible (see Compression -> Compressed when modifying your profile). SyncBack has always had the option to not try to compress files that are already compressed based on their filename extension. For example, there is no point trying to compress MP3 files as they are already compressed.
With this new optional setting (Auto-detect files that may not compress) SyncBack will quickly compress 1MB of data from the middle of a file. This is done in-memory and using a low compression level. If that data cannot be compressed by more than 5% then the file is considered to already be compressed or the compression rate is so low it is not worth trying to compress the file. It is important to note that it is impossible to know if a file can be compressed or not unless you actually compress it using the compression method and levels chosen. Therefore, this method of checking for compressibility is not fool proof.
These are just some examples of changes introduced in V11. Visit our V11 page to see the many other improvements made in V11.
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