• Jesus@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    That’s not how lossless compression works. No data is lost.

    For example, if you zip a folder of images, then unzip them, the pictures come out with their original sizes and structure. Zip is lossless.

    Let’s use the analogy of a dish sponge.

    Let’s pretend you wanted to make a dish sponge smaller. Lossy compression would make the sponge smaller by cutting off parts and throwing them away. Lossless would make it smaller by squish the sponge, and it would return to its normal shape once you stopped squishing it.

    • ozymandias117@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      For your analogy, you can’t put more water in a sponge that is completely saturated

      Trying to compress a compressed file doesn’t really work - at least not for a meaningful gain in storage size with zip, bzip, 7zip, gzip, xz, lzma…