I have 4 apps that I'm trying to compress as much as possible and I discovered that I can get a much better compression just by manually moving the files that are common for all 4 projects into a fifth folder. The files are identical (I used Beyond Compare 4 to find them)
basket-api = 116 MB catalog-api = 133 MB identity-api = 127 MB ordering-api = 120 MB
When I use 7-zip to compress these folders I get a .7z file which is 150 MB. Which is pretty good.
Then I tried to split the common files in to a separate folder as I explained
I could easily recreate the original folders just by copying the files from common into all of the other stripped folders.
But this time when I run 7-zip the .7z file is only 52MB!
What's going on? How can this simple manual trick make the compression so much better?