At work, we recently stopped using both bzip2 and gzip for compression. Instead, we’re now using xz which utilizes the LZMA2 algorithm. Why on earth would someone switch compression algorithms? I’ll tell you why. Because, I have used xz to compress all manner of files and it consistently out-performs bzip2! For example, I compressed a 66mb SQL dump with both xz and bzip2. The results were that xz created a file over 1.5mb smaller than the one created by bzip2. original: 67386kb bzip2: 5716.972kb xz: 4117.625kb To the casual user this might not seem like a lot but for large files and archives, the savings add up.