How Reordering Files Reduced My Archive Size by Half

Background I have a solar inverter made by Fronius that uploads json to an ftp server every ten seconds. There are two different json files (*.powerflow and *.interverter) with slightly different information. Every day, this means there are about 10k files and the file sizes vary but are usually between 500-1000 bytes each. On the local filesystem that equates to about 40MB per day. Over a year,…