A single point of data rarely answers the question unless you're looking for absolutes. "Will zipping 10 files individually be smaller than zipping them into a single file?" Sure, easy enough to do it once. Now, what kind of data are we talking about? How big, and how random, is the data in those files? Does it get better with more files, or is the a sweet spot where it's better, but it's worse if you use too few files, or too many? I don't think you could test for those scenarios very quickly, and they all fall under the original question. OTOH, someone who has studied the subject could probably give you an answer easily enough in just a few minutes. Or he could have tried a web search and find the answer, which pretty much comes down to, "It depends which compression system you use."