Patent ID: 7961960

Claim:
A machine-implemented method of classifying files for purpose of including the files or fragments thereof in a concatenation suitcase whose contents are to be supplied to one or more prediction-based compression engines, the method comprising: (a) within a processor, scanning through a storage space of an associated memory and identifying files that are likely to be alike files by means of automatically detecting those of the potentially alike files which have one or more of: (a.1) similar file sizes; (a.2) similar registry extensions; (a.3) similar other directory attributes; and (a.4) residence within a common, high level folder that includes lower level folders; (b) scanning through the storage space and statistically analyzing frequency of symbol occurrences in the scanned files; (c) defining corresponding symbol occurrence histograms for the analyzed files; and (c) identifying among the defined symbol occurrence histograms those that are most alike.