The problem, of course, is that these programs take time to run. Another problem is that sometimes data doesn’t compress well and if you add the overhead of the compression, you might not get ...

There are two categories of data compression. The first reduces the size of a single file to save storage space and transmit faster. The second is for storage and transmission convenience.

we have made available a pair of general-purpose image compression programs, called fpack and funpack, which can be used to compress any FITS format image. Pence, W. D. 1999, in ASP Conf. Ser. 172, ...