Right now I tend to stick with gzip and bzip2, and rarely xz. I like the fact when I gzip/bzip2, my laptop does not heat up to a degree where I could fry an egg on it :)<p>Plus with the size of drives, getting 10% or so better encryption does not matter too much to me. If it saved 25% on huge files, maybe I would reconsider.<p>I did a comparison on a 43 gig file, here are the sizes I got.<p>Size and compression time comparison:<p>* txt: 43G n/a<p>* gz: 20G Compression Time 00:38:37<p>* bz2: 18G Compression Time 01:16:45<p>* xz: 18G Compression Time 12:25:42 (300M smaller than bz2)<p>The original 43G file was compressed via 7zip, and was about 600M smaller than the xz version.<p>This was done on a Thinkpad W541, my main system.