Winrar compression archive making things BIGGER?

[RainOfPain125]

I was putting all of my belongings into a single folder to zip up and transfer to another drive as I wipe my drive and reinstall windows. These both have the same exact data. I archived the .rar with RAR4 on the best compression method and now it's way bigger than what I started out with
 

Why could this be?

[rcmaehl]

Why you should be using 7zip /s

I understand compressing something that can't be compressed further can increase the file size, but I've never seen anything increase in size this much. Odd.

[RainOfPain125]

1 minute ago, rcmaehl said:

Why you should be using 7zip /s

I understand compressing something that can't be compressed further can increase the file size, but I've never seen anything increase in size this much. Odd.

I mean, I tried looking around at which ones had the best compression ratio. If you can show me some benchmark or test that shows the 7zip is better, then I'll use that over rar in my next wipe 

 

But yeah. It was full of pictures, txts, my server files, and thats it. Maybe a few other misc things like .svg or .gimp

[TheElectronicGeek1]

1 hour ago, RainOfPain125 said:

I mean, I tried looking around at which ones had the best compression ratio. If you can show me some benchmark or test that shows the 7zip is better, then I'll use that over rar in my next wipe 

 

But yeah. It was full of pictures, txts, my server files, and thats it. Maybe a few other misc things like .svg or .gimp

Try changing the compression level and see what it does.