"DO NOT COMPRESS ANY DATA WITH THIS PROGRAM UNLESS YOU ARE PREPARED TO ACCEPT THE POSSIBILITY, HOWEVER SMALL, THAT THE DATA WILL NOT BE RECOVERABLE."

So why would anybody, hobbyist or enterprise, use this? Or does something older like 7zip also have this caveat that I've never experienced.

▲

palaiologos 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Tool author here. bzip2 also has this clause, in fact it has been lifted from its dist tarball README verbatim. So does lzma, xz, or in practice any open source program that you use.

▲

jubilanti 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is that all that different than the standard MIT License:

> THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE....

	▲	ibejoeb 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Practically, no. But that specific disclaimer could lead on to think that there may have been some observed data corruption in practice that isn't disclosed. I have no idea if there is, but I'm not keen to discover it myself. Also practically, this isn't MIT. It is LGPL 3, which I believe includes the warranty terms of GPL 3, i.e., no warranty. So we're in the same place anyway.

▲

fmx 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This big warning gave me pause, too. Why not have a compression option that automatically checks the data after compression (by decompressing and checking against a hash of the original data), which would reduce the probability of undetected errors to that of a hash collision? i.e. like `7z a` followed by `7z t`, but in one command.