Before your files are encrypted using your own unique encryption key, they are compressed using state-of-the-art compression technology. This compression ensures that the time it takes to do backups is shorter.  And because each file is significantly smaller, you use less storage space on our servers.

Different file types tend to compress to different levels. Some files, such as multimedia files like Ms and pictures are already compressed, so you will see little additional compression. Other files such as Microsoft Word documents and many databases can compress more than 80%. While your compression results may vary, following are some representative results for certain files based on actual data. For many files, compression rates depend a great deal on the ratio of text to binary information.  For example, you will notice a much better compression for Microsoft Outlook .pst files and Microsoft Exchange databases if most emails contain only text rather than binary attachments.

The following table shows some average compression rates for several different types of commonly used files.  Please keep in mind that your compression results may vary.

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