I'm downloading Total War Medieval 2 from GG right now and wondering how I'm going to back this thing up as it's friggin' 13 gigs big!

RAR?

I mean, a series of RAR archives? I think I used to use WinRAR for that sort of thing.

All respectable file archivers like WinRAR or 7-zip have "split to volumes" option. Add selected files/folders to archive and select desired volume size (eg. 4480 MB).

Remember to turn OFF compression.

I don't think it's even possible to get that kind of compression for game files. I mean, whoa, 13 gigs to 9.4. Couldn't you find an additional DVD, or two double layer ones? Or perhaps you should invest in an external hard drive?

Actually he's gonna need compression to save space in this case....but i'd recommend making some par files after(before?) raring in case the rars ever corrupt or get lost.

Won't make a difference. Those files are presumably already compressed. He's not going to get more than at most 1% or so compression. All it's going to do is add a lot of overhead to the process.

Oh forgot that.....still I recommend some par files. Good for keeping a safety net at any rate in case of rar part corruption or losing the parts somehow.

PAR files won't be of any use if you lose some parts of the archive :P
And it seems overkill to me especially if he isn't keen on sharing the files online or something.

Compression rate depends on the files and the settings. If the game has lots of very small files you can gain much space by compressing, same for dds textures, bitmaps and expecially models. But most of the time it's already tightly packaged somehow. And solid compression is the best for lots of small files.

Otherwise, since it's the installer files you're downloading I'd just copy paste the files as is on an external hard drive.

Thanks for the suggestions

So a double layer DVD would give me 9.4 Gigs space? I would only need one of those and standard DVD but double layer are only for recording DVD movies, right? Or can I put this game data on a double layer as well?

7z. Every time.

Forget WinRar ever existed and forget that the rar format exists. You don't need it. 7zip is perfect.

I've never DL from GG, but usually for D2D games I actually go the opposite way. The files they give you are very often a self-extracting archive that turns into essentially the same files that you'd normally get on DVD (and the extracter automatically runs the setup from this file). These usually take up only slightly more space than the original archive, plus it usually still has an autorun file, so all you need to do is write it to two DL DVDs in your case (if it follows the pattern I've seen in releases from D2D it should be easy to figure out which files go on which disc). If you don't have DL media and writer, you can probably split it up into more DVDs, and setup may even still run straight from the discs, depending on how you burn them and how the files are set up.

Sure you can. Movies are just 0 and 1s, your data are 0 and 1s, DVDs store 0 and 1s. DL DVDs are optical media just like all the other Discs. It's all just files on a disc.

I love me some LZMA2, mmmhhh... tasty!

Easy way, faster, bigger archives: Install WinRAR. When you download the whole game, make an archive of the files. Like, select them all, and add them to a RAR archive. Make sure to check the option for archive-splitting. Define the max size for the archives, and WinRAR will automatically take care of the rest.

Hard way, slower, smallest archives possible: Install PeaZip, and make a PAQ archive. Should bring down the game to 50MB (this is just a guess, it could be a few GBs in the end though). Although it would require you a few days to compress the damn thing. :)

haha I remember doing tests with PAQ8Q compressor. Can take an hour for a few MBs using a Quad-Core :P

Personally I loath DVDs for backup purposes; I find that I get far too many incomplete/corrupt burns on DVDs and that is on the day I burn - later on they can still mess up.

Personally I think if you want a proper backup solution the best thing is to invest in an external harddrive, they are not "too" expensive these days. They can also be as unreliable as any harddrive, but I've found them more reliable than homeburnt DVDs (also for more expensive backing up of GBs of data it just takes forever with DVDs whilst an external harddrive is far quicker and simpler).

If you want to get really technical and have the budget for it you can look into a RAID backup setup with external harddrives.