Deprecated by the newer BZ2 or BZIP2 archive files, the BZIP extension indicates that the contents of the file have been archived and compressed using the "BZip" compression method--- a run length encoding and Burrows-Wheeler compression algorithm. This compression algorithm allows the files to be much smaller than ZIP and GZIP files once compressed, but is much slower than either of the above compression algorithms when attempting to compress or decompress large files.