It's taking up a lot of space but you are done with it. So say you filled a folder with files for a project for work. Older projects from work or personal use that you no longer need regular access to. So what should you archive? Well, the best example are projects. So what I really mean by archiving today is taking files off your Mac's internal drive where space is limited and moving them to a large external drive or other storage solution. So compressing them can be frustrating because you don't seem to save much space. Even documents that have things inside it, like PDF's and word processing documents that have images in them, they use those images in compressed format. So if you take a 100 MB document today you may find that by compressing it you don't save any space at all. Image files, video files, audio files, and other types of documents already use lots of compression. Compressing really doesn't work as well anymore because most of the files we deal with are already compressed. So you may have a 100 MB document file, compress it, and you end up with say a 30 MB file and you don't have easy access to it anymore but it's still there on your hard drive taking up a lot less space. Years ago if you said you wanted to archive a file what you actually did with it was compress the file to make it smaller but a little harder to access. But what exactly do I mean by archiving files? Well, an old definition of archiving would have to do with compression. I often talk about archiving files especially in situations where you are limited in disk space or your internal hard drive is full.

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MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 900 supporters. Today let's talk about archiving files on your Mac. Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with. Check out How To Archive Files On a Mac at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

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