Lzip is a lossless data compressor with a user interface similar to the one of gzip or bzip2. Lzip can compress about as fast as gzip (lzip -0) or compress most files more than bzip2 (lzip -9). Decompression speed is intermediate between gzip and bzip2. Lzip is better than gzip and bzip2 from a data recovery perspective. Lzip has been designed, written and tested with great care to replace gzip and bzip2 as the standard general-purpose compressed format for unix-like systems.
The lzip file format is designed for data sharing and long-term archiving, taking into account both data integrity and decoder availability:
- The lzip format provides very safe integrity checking and some data recovery means. The lziprecover program can repair bit flip errors (one of the most common forms of data corruption) in lzip files, and provides data recovery capabilities, including error-checked merging of damaged copies of a file.
- The lzip format is as simple as possible (but not simpler). The lzip manual provides the source code of a simple decompressor along with a detailed explanation of how it works, so that with the only help of the lzip manual it would be possible for a digital archaeologist to extract the data from a lzip file long after quantum computers eventually render LZMA obsolete.
- Additionally the lzip reference implementation is copylefted, which guarantees that it will remain free forever.
The suffix .lz is used for files compressed with lzip.
See
https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20181020.205455.fbab5607.en.html for negative claims about Lzip.