I constantly send my colleagues archives weighing 5-10 gigabytes. WinRAR compresses slowly, 7-Zip is faster, but I don't know which one to use for maximum speed and compression ratio. What would you recommend?
7-Zip has already shown you it's faster - that's a fair observation, because WinRAR is noticeably slower at compression, especially with large volumes. If speed is critical, then 7-Zip is your choice, plus it's free and compresses pretty well. Though your colleagues will need to have it installed to extract it - keep that in mind when sending files.
If you need maximum compression and don't mind spending time on archiving, you can increase the compression level in 7-Zip's settings (up to level 9), but that'll slow things down. For regular exchange of large files, I'd go with 7-Zip on default settings - the balance between speed and archive size is good.
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