Legal: Any of the following file operations is at your own risk. Neither McNeel, nor myself, nor the moderators will be responsible should anything go wrong. File operations like these are best done after a full backup on removable media.
With that stated, for years, I have used 7Zip, and not had any problems. I tend to make a lot of saves, usually every time I work on a file or make a large change.
7Zip generally compresses Rhino3D files to about 20% of their size. It’s open source and free as in Free-Beer! and it runs on most platforms. No, I am not affiliated with 7Zip, or their website, in any way.
It can be downloaded here for most platforms. Please make sure that you are downloading the actual right thing. Do not click on any monkey : )
https://www.7-zip.org/
Firstly, well after your full backup, I usually do all of my saves as Save Small, with no rendering meshes, and no texture packs. I load the materials from the project folder. The meshes are big, so if you see any pesky file that are significantly larger than the other, they likely aren’t saved small. They can be resaved as small, BUT that will change the file date, as well as rewriting the file.
Note: There was a Rhino script that would parse a folded and resave any non-small files. It’s on this forum, somewhere. I will look for it.
Also, I habitually do a incremental save, and immediately resave small right over it. There was a script for this, I think it does not work any longer.
The files may be saved either as an archive–or perhaps individually, which would be safer, but take more space in both in the archive and the file system.
For small to medium sized, I compress about a 100 at time, or when the archive gets big. I would keep the archives under a few gig. It is safer to have smaller archives than larger ones. Also, formats such as Fat32 generally don’t like any file over 4GB. MS recently expanded either vFAT for larger something, but it’s better to be safe. On Windows, empty thumb drives can be reformatted with NTFS for larger blocks, noting that Flash drives generally are NOT archival, and CDs and DVDs bit-rot and fail over time.
When selecting the file to be archived, do not attempt to canonically put the archive inside of itself–or–a dimensional doorway will be ripped in the time-space. : ) Pinhead and the others will come.
Anyway, these are the settings I use. Notice the Non-Solid. Non-solid is the safer, larger option. Once again, safety first. Regrettably, splitting the archive does NOT make atomic files that each have their own tables and whatnot, meaning that if you lose one file out of the set–it’s all bad.
After the files are compressed, I always test the archive. I have not had problems with 7ZIP, yet, but still I test.
Only at this point do I delete the original files.
Results:
100 Files Before: 4,230,624,585 bytes
100 Files After: 724,383,516 bytes
17.12% of the original size.
Going Further: 7Zip has a command-line version as well as a GUI version. Perhaps a script could be written to do a small save and archive it in the background.
