If you are a GIMP user you can end up with plenty of .xcf files. I do all my editing with xcfs after importing from RAW with the excellent ufraw-gimp plugin. But they can get pretty big…
Step forward bzip2. If you are running linux, you will already have bzip installed, and the bonus is that GIMP can read and write natively its xcf files compressed with bzip. There is a small performance hit on opening and saving files, but you can save 10-40% of file-size; that can easily be 40 MiB for a simple file with a couple of layers.
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