Efficiency of lossless data compression

Data compression is important part of information and communication technologies. There are many benefits from using data compression, like saving space on hard drives or lowering use of transmission bandwidth in the network. There are also many algorithms and many tools that are used today in this field. In this paper we will focus on lossless data compression and give a short overview of algorithms that are used in the most popular data archiving tools for lossless data compression. Compression rate of data files depends a lot on the type of data so the test will be carried out on a group of most commonly used data types. Tools for data compression implement known algorithms in many different variations and we will determine which tools have the best compression capabilities, which are the fastest and which tools have the best relation between compression and speed.