News

2005-07-25: A new beta version lzop 1.02 rc1 has been released. Please give it some good testing and report all problems to the author.

(As of Oct 2006 there has not been any problem report, and 1.02rc1 will get released as official version 1.02 whenever I find some spare time.)

Abstract

lzop is a file compressor which is very similar to gzip. lzop uses the LZO data compression library for compression services, and its main advantages over gzip are much higher compression and decompression speed (at the cost of some compression ratio).

lzop is copyrighted OpenSource software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Features

lzop is the fastest compressor and decompressor around. See the well-known Archive Comparison Test for details.

On modern systems, when making backups of terrabyte of data, lzop is usually IO-bound and not CPU-bound, which means that you can both decrease storage requirements and effectively reduce backup time by quite an amount.

lzop was designed with the following goals in mind:

• speed (both compression and decompression)
• reasonable drop-in compatibility to gzip
• portability

General functionality and behaviour has been modelled very closely after gzip. The main differences between lzop and gzip are:

• files compressed by lzop will have the suffix `.lzo'
• lzop does not delete the input file(s) by default.

Read the

• Documentation
• ChangeLog

Download

• source code
  


• Precompiled binaries are available for
  • Linux/i386 (statically linked)
  • Windows (Win32 console version)
  • 32-bit DOS
  • OS/2
  • Atari TOS/MiNT


• Official lzop packages are available for
  • BeOS
  • Debian GNU/Linux
  • FreeBSD
  • Gentoo Linux
  • NetBSD
  • OpenBSD

Navigate to

• the LZO Home Page
• oberhumer.com Compression Links


• the gzip file compressor
• the bzip2 file compressor