Lzip lossy compression

What is lzip?
Glad you asked. Lzip is an advanced file compression utility that generates smaller file sizes than either gzip or bzip2, and does so much faster. Lzip can achieve these goals because it it based on a so-called "lossy" compression scheme (most other utilties make use of slower, less efficient "lossless" compression). For more information, you can consult the Frequently Asked Questions list. Or, you can dive right in, grab the 1.0 tarball and start reducing your bloated files down to 10%, 15%, in some cases 0% of their original size!

Running lzip:
To compress a file using lzip, simply type lzip N filename --where N is a digit from 0 to 9, specifying the level of compression you desire. 9 will result in very little compression (it may actually increase the size of your file, if it was pretty small to begin with), and 1 will result in quite a lot of compression. 0 will compress all data down to 0KB.
You may optionally specify the name of the compressed file with lzip N filename newfilename. By default, lzip appends a ".lz" to the original filename if no newfilename is specified.

Running lunzip:
To restore a file compressed with lzip, type lunzip filename.lz. Unfortunately, at this time only files which end with the suffix ".lz" can be uncompressed. This is an issue we are working on for the next release, or maybe the one after that if we forget.
Users new to lzip must keep in mind that files compressed with lzip can be uncompressed, but will not be restored to their exact original state. This is the result of using lossy compression. Bear in mind, though, that the data lost in this process is most likely the least important data in the file, so most of the time you probably won't even notice.

Lzip lossy compression

Fonte: Looris
Note: abbastanza old