system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Can an archive file be smaller after unpacking?
gpt
Definitely - if you compress data that's totally incompressible. When you compress a file, the archiving program will store metadata (headers) that tell it how to unpack the data. If you can't actually make the data any smaller, then you'll be left with the same size data as before plus the metadata, giving you a bigger file than you started with.