Question

What is data compression and what purpose does it serve?

Answer 1

Data compression is a reduction in the number of bits needed to represent data. Compressing data can save storage capacity, speed up file transfer, and decrease costs for storage hardware and network bandwidth.

A common data compression technique removes and replaces repetitive data elements and symbols to reduce the data size. Data compression for graphical data can be lossless compression or lossy compression, where the former saves all replaces but save all repetitive data and the latter deletes all repetitive data.