Select the Degree of Compression

To select how much compression you want when adding files:

1. Select Options from the Application Menu.

2. Select the Compression category.

3. Select a setting from the Compression drop-down menu list:

Setting	What It Does
Normal	Sets the level of compression to 5 on a scale of 0 - 9, where 0 is no compression. Provides a balance of compression and performance.
Speed	Sets the level of compression to 1 on a scale of 0 - 9: Favors performance over compression
Fast	Sets the level of compression to 2 on a scale of 0 - 9: Gives more compression than Speed but still favors performance
Maximum	Sets the level of compression to 9 on a scale of 0 - 9: Maximum compression
Custom	Enables the Customize button. See below.

To select a compression algorithm and/or a custom level of compression:

1. Choose Custom from the Compression drop-down menu to enable the Customize button.

2. Choose Customize to open the Customize Compression dialog.

3. Select a compression method from the drop-down menu.

Deflate is the method Smartcrypt uses by default for ZIP and OpenPGP files. Other methods may offer greater speed but less compression, or vice versa. The degree of compression that any method can achieve depends greatly on the kind of data being compressed.

Note: Other ZIP-format compression utilities may not be able to extract files compressed using methods other than Deflate.

Algorithm	Description
Store	Does not compress at all
Deflate	The default compression method used for ZIP files
Deflate64	A more powerful version of the Deflate method
DCL Implode	The PKWARE Data Compression Library compression method: Lets you optimize for binary or ASCII files. Is typically faster than Deflate but provides less compression.
BZIP2	Typically provides more compression than Deflate but uses more memory and processing power and is slower
LZMA	Often produces a higher compression ratio than Bzip2 but uses a lot of memory— as much as 16 MB— and takes more time than Deflate
PPMd	Achieves especially good compression for natural language text but can use a lot of memory (~16 MB) and takes more time than Deflate

4. Position the slider on the scale between Minimum and Maximum to pick a level of compression. (The slider is not offered for every algorithm.)

5. If you picked the DCL Implode compression method, select a radio button: Binary or ASCII.

DCL Implode enables you to optimize compression and performance for the type of file you are compressing: ASCII text or binary. If all the files you are adding are ASCII text files, select ASCII. No data is corrupted if you add ASCII text files when Binary is selected, or if you add binary files when ASCII is selected.

6. Choose OK.