While the LZFSE algorithm is the fastest and most energy efficient option offered by Apple, it's not the only option available to developers.

This has since been adopted in watchOS and tvOS as well. With Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11) and iOS 9, Apple made further improvements by introducing a compression algorithm known as LZFSE into the operating system.

Any software using Apple's APIs could take advantage of this, however at the time this was not enabled by default due to various reasons - users needed to use the Terminal to take advantage of it.Īs time went by and software was updated, the use of Apple's compression technology became mainstream. Over time Apple continually improved the HFS+ file system so that by the time Mac OS X 10.6 was launched it actually incorporated AppleFSCompression which is essentially the same feature you're referring to. As time went by the need (and popularity) for these packages waned significantly - mainly because the HFS+ file system was released in the late 1990s and this allowed much smaller block sizes and much larger disk capacities. However, the reason for their popularity was largely due to the small hard drive sizes of that era. These products were very popular at the time (from memory, Disk Doubler was one of the most popular software packages sold for the Mac platform). Disk Doubler was probably the most popular (because it started the trend), but other options included AutoDoubler and SuperDisk! In the pre-Mac OS X days there were a number of products that basically achieved the same thing. It’s called Archive Utility, and can be found via a Spotlight search.There is no need for users to enable/disable transparent compression in macOS as it's built into the file system. You can change the destination of your compressed files by opening the app that does the compression. How to make zip files save somewhere else You can use a free app such asįolderWasher to remove dot files before creating the zip. These are Mac system files and can be ignored. Note that Windows users decompressing your zip will also see ‘dot files’ – files and folders whose filenames are preceded by dots or sometimes underscores (such as ‘.DS_Store’ or ‘_MACOSX’). Once zipping has completed, drag the folder you created to the Trash.

Then hold down Ctrl and click the folder, selecting the Compress option on the menu. Drag and drop the files you want to be in the zip, but hold down Alt before releasing the mouse button so the files are copied there. To compress several files and/or folders, create a new folder (Shift +Ĭmd + N) within Finder or on the desktop and name it whatever you want the zip to be called.

You can delete the original file if you wish, but you won’t be able to view or use the zipped file in its present form: you’ll need to unzip it first. zip file can now be emailed to a friend or simply stored until needed.

Compress folder mac