For IT professionals or power users running daily incremental backups, waiting for high-compression algorithms is a bottleneck. LZ4 allows for "backup windows" that shrink from hours to minutes, though the resulting backup file will be larger. This trade-off is often acceptable for hot backups of live servers.
7z a -mm=LZ4 -mx=3 output.7z input_folder
| Compressor | Time to Compress | Compressed Size | Time to Decompress | | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | | | 4 min 12 sec | 6.3 GB | 48 sec | | 7‑Zip LZMA2 (Fast, 4 threads) | 1 min 45 sec | 7.8 GB | 37 sec | | Modded 7‑Zip LZ4 (Default, 8 threads) | 11 seconds | 8.5 GB | 3.2 seconds | | Modded 7‑Zip LZ4 HC (8 threads) | 42 seconds | 7.9 GB | 3.1 seconds |
If you prefer to keep the official 7-Zip GUI but simply want the ability to read or create LZ4 files:
Excels at high-ratio, slow compression (LZMA/LZMA2).
This is the "interesting" version you are likely looking for. It is a fork that adds several modern compression methods directly into the 7-Zip UI and command line. Supported Codecs: Adds LZ4, Zstandard (Zstd), Brotli, Lizard, and Lz5. The LZ4 Advantage: LZ4 is designed for extreme speed
The most prominent "modded" version is , developed by Tino Reichardt. This fork integrates several alternative compression algorithms that are not part of the official 7-Zip mainline, including LZ4 , Zstandard (Zstd) , Brotli , and Lizard .
LZ4 focuses on a different philosophy: extreme speed. Created by Yann Collet, LZ4 is a lossless compression algorithm focused on compression and decompression speeds executing at multiple gigabytes per second per CPU core.
Look for Codec ID: LZ4 under Codecs info .
Compression is usually a tradeoff: you either save space and wait forever, or save time and use no compression at all.
