The best way to compress the files and folders to use the command bzip2.
format: bzip2 [options] filename
bunzip2 [options] filename
Eg1: bzip2 backup.tar
Here it compresses the file backup.tar and store it as backup.tar.bz2
Eg2: bunzip2 backup.tar.bz2
Here it expands the file backup.tar.bz2 backto backup.tar