Last modified: 2011-11-29 03:20:57 UTC
pages-articles.xml.bz2 "Articles, templates, image descriptions, and primary meta-pages" ("the archive most mirror sites will probably want") is currently only avaliable in .bz2 It should be made available in .7z as well pages-meta-history.xml.7z is 3.2 GB the .bz2 is 5 gigs It would appear that .7z is 64% of the size of .bz2 So pages-articles.xml.bz2 could be aprox 1.7 gigs, instead of 2.7 gigs. This may even reduce some server load/bandwith.
The extreme size savings for the history dumps are due to better compression of the multiple-revision runs. Current-version dumps compress to about the same size with .bz2 and .7z, but p7zip takes much much longer to run.