Everybody and welcome to the next video and this video and we're talking about compression.
Now what is data compression.
It's the reduction of size or a number of bits needed to accurately represent its original data.
This is commonly referred to as a compression algorithm as well.
Now you're going to be most familiar with this in the verb in the term of like a zip file or a G zip
file or rar file where it's compressing the data into a smaller set so it doesn't take up as much storage
space.
Now why is this needed storage space as the number one need for this.
Because you could take something that's a gig and move it down to 400 mag 500 mag three hundred mag
200 mag that is a serious reduction in storage space.
It also speeds up data transfers.
Would you rather just transfer 10 gigs of logs over or a gig at logs over it also decreases the cost
for hardware as well as the hardware managing the network speed so the network bandwidth and everything
like that.
It's important to understand the reasons why people use compression and you'll find it everywhere and
what system you're on whether it's the log files or something else you're going to find compression
and used in most cases at some point in the system.
Now why is this important so why is important but these are some of the important bits that we need
to go understand is you don't want to compress something that's already being compressed so depending
on how you compressed it re compression can do one of two things you could either lose a lot of data
or nothing that really changes the problem.
That is when you start on compressing things and you've re compressed it multiple different times you
may you may run into issues where you didn't let's say you compress something one way and then you took
that file compressed in a different way maybe you saved one percent more.
But when you give it to somebody they're going to see it as a standard compressed file.
So when they uncompressed it it's not going to be their data so they're not going to know that's been
compressed twice to different ways.
So it's important to understand that you can compress almost any file you want.
There's a few stipulations which will go over in the next few videos but understanding can compress
almost any file.
And again the most common place you're going to see this is something with like a log rotate which will
automatically compress log files because the log files are just text which has a lot of redundant information
a lot of redundant digits and everything like that.
So you're going to see a lot of a lot of the sizes of log files go from like a gig to only a few megabytes
because of the amount of data that has that's replicated between every single line of the log file.
Now there are two types of compressions.
There's lossy and lossless where we have a home video on this next.
So I'm not going to cover that here but then there some common types of compressions which is Elsie
77 and Elsie 78.
Again they'll have their own video I'm just pointing that here.
You kind of know what's coming up next.