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I'm using win 7.I have disk ~2Tb which one I want to format so I need to move data from it to other disk, but the problem is that I have not another 2Tb disk and I think I can compress data(on the fly) when I move it to other disks.

Which tools are suitable for this? At start I think about .zip or 7zip but what limitations of size of archive it have? maybe there is better compression scheme? How it will work? For example I have 12 Gb file and want to copy it to 5 Gb disk, so I don't want it to start to work and then tell me that there is no enough space, but I want to check before run how much Gb of storage needed(depending on my data and compression scheme).

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  • How much data is on the disk you want to format? How much data are you trying to save? How big is the "spare" disk that you have where you want to store the data while formatting?
    – yosh m
    Commented Apr 17, 2014 at 7:19
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    There is no such thing as a predictable compression ratio. Deal with it.
    – Daniel B
    Commented Apr 17, 2014 at 7:29
  • @yoshm I want to format full disk. The question is that I have X Gb of data I want to know how large "spare" disk I need to backup it.
    – mrgloom
    Commented Apr 17, 2014 at 7:31
  • @DanielB why not? What if algorithm pass through data and calc size of resulting archive?If it needed for "dictionary"(or something) it may use some "buffer" on disk which size is previously predifined and deleted after calculation.
    – mrgloom
    Commented Apr 17, 2014 at 7:36
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    Because this is how compression works. You cannot tell the size until you go through the file and try to compress it.
    – ek9
    Commented Apr 17, 2014 at 7:40

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You can`t predict the compression size. The only chance I see is to try this:

7z a -t7z -mx9 -o f:\outputDirectory e:\inputDirectory

Compress all the files, and just wait if its finishes or abort due to the lack of spaaace.

Note that 7z.exe needs to be in your path for this command. Alternativly you can specify the full path to the 7z.exe

C:\Programs\7-Zip\7z a -t7z -mx9 -o f:\outputDirectory e:\inputDirectory
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