Music files - MP3 mostly. Everyday use.
Video files - VOB, MOV, AVI, MKV and MP4. Using them from time to time.
Pictures - JPG mostly. Using them from time to time.
Text files - PDF, MHT (HTML site in one file), TXT. Most of the files are used once per year at best.
Programs - lots of EXE and DLL executable files. Using them on daily basis.
After the analysis I found out there is a way to compress 99% of my files and still be able to open them by just double clicking! Of course to do that I needed to change some formats, loose some (unnoticeable) quality and loose a lot of time (most of the time was for research, so you won't lose it as I'm giving you all info in one place), but it was totally worth it! I was able to shrink all my files and add a lot more and still have almost half of my Dropbox free! In numbers, I was able to compress ~35GB to ~15GB!!! That's 20GB saved! And I still have 10GB of free space with all my music and pictures being in a save place :) So, how I did it? Let's get down to the details:
Music files
MP3 is an old format and as such it's not the best. There are other formats which can provide better quality on the same bitrate. Also it's proven that 128 kbps MP3 is enough for most people. Only trained ear can make difference between 128 kbps and 320 kbps MP3. So compressing your MP3 files to 128 kbps will save you a lot disk space (saved me 7GB), but you'll loose some quality (not that you'll notice it). To minimize quality loss, use another file format, newer that MP3! There are OGG, WMA, AC3 and others. I personally used OGG, but WMA is better integrated (almost all MP3 players read it) - you decide. To encode my files into the new format I used MediaCoder with the following settings:
Video files
VOB files are VERY large files! They are one of the main reasons I got 20GB saved :D Other files are small, but not as small as I wanted to! So I searched Internet about the best new (newer almost always is better) codec that have support in players too. I ended up with Google's WebM. It was able to compress 250MB VOB into 32MB WEBM file! Of course there is slight (unnoticeable) quality loss, but when you watch this video say 10-15 years from now, the quality then will be much better and this VOB's quality will look awful with or without this small quality loss. The memories this video brings you are important, not the video quality itself ;) Other files are already compressed, so WEBP was able to slice the size in two without any quality loss! So how do I encode to WebM? Well, the best way I found is using an Add-on for Mozilla Firefox (I'm a Chrome fan, but sometimes Firefox beats the crap out of Chrome) called Firefogg.
Pictures
It turns out WebM has a sister project called WebP for pictures instead of movies :) So I used it. It was able to smack 5MB JPG into 1MB WEBP without any loss! For already compressed JPEGs with size of 1-1.5MB, WebP was able to deliver files with sizes between 100-150KB! Also WebP supports lossless compression with alpha channel, so you can smack your PNG files too :) GIF files are in the works ;) For more on how to compress your images using WebP see my earlier blog post.Text files
Here I did a bit of cheating - I uploaded as much as I could in Google Docs and compressed text files which I do not use often (for an example my old HTML projects). All the text files were less than 100MB, so not much cheating. But there are some files left, too big to be uploaded to Google Docs. 55MB PDF file! Google Docs allows only 2MB file to be uploaded :( Almost all of my PDF files were larger. Not to mention MHT files. So what I did is I compressed those PDFs with Adobe Acrobat Pro using this tutorial. This sliced 20MB off of this large PDF! And the end result is again PDF! So it just compresses the PDF. The down side is reduced compatibility - older PDF readers won't be able to read it. Who cares - Chrome reads it :D What about MHTs? Well here I had to make a couple of conversions to be able to convert MHT to PDF and then compress it using Acrobat Pro. Chrome cannot open MHT files, but can print everything to PDF file. So I needed this MHT opened in Chrome no matter what! Well, the solution is simple - open it with IE and save it as complete web page. Then open this HTML file with Chrome and print it as PDF. After that crush it with Acrobat Pro and you should have smaller PDF than the MHT. If you are advanced web user like me, you can even open object inspector and remove useless stuff from the web page before printing - this will further reduce the size of the PDF ;) In the end, after the compression, I uploaded again to Google Docs files with sizes smaller than 2MB. End result - 50% less space for text files :)Programs
This actually is quite simple - use PortableApps.com AppCompactor to compress all of your programs. Backup all programs before use. Set to best compression first. Compress them one by one and test them after compression. If the program doesn't run, copy over the backup and try again with other compression algorithm. In my case all compressed perfectly with the best compression :)
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