Compression

LZ-based

Deflate/Inflate

Used in:

• Expert Witness (Compression) Format (ewf)
• gzip
• Personal Folder File (PAB, PST, OST), in compressed Offline Storage Table (OST) files.
• QCOW Image Format, in compressed images
• VMWare Virtual Disk Format (vmdk), in compressed images

LZNT1

Used in:

• NTFS
• Windows SuperFetch Format

LZSS

• Wikipedia: Lempel–Ziv–Storer–Szymanski

LZX

Used in:

• Microsoft Cabinet Format

The Windows implementation of LZX can be found in lz32.dll and is used by the WINAPI LZ functions e.g. LZOpenFile.

LZXPRESS

Used in:

• Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) Database File (EDB) format

LZXPRESS Huffman

Variant of LZXPRESS that uses Huffman encoding.

Used in:

• Windows SuperFetch Format, Windows 7

LZXPRESS Huffman stream

Variant of LZXPRESS Huffman that allows for LZ compression tuples that refer to previous blocks of uncompressed data.

Used in:

• Windows Prefetch File Format, Windows 10
• Windows SuperFetch Format, Windows 8

External Links

• Wikipedia: Lempel-Ziv
• Microsoft Compression Formats

Deflate/Inflate

• Wikipedia: DEFLATE
• RFC1950 - ZLIB Compressed Data Format Specification, by IETF
• RFC1951 - DEFLATE Compressed Data Format Specification, by IETF

LZXpress

• MS-XCA: Xpress Compression Algorithm, by Microsoft