What Is an LZ4 File and Why Is It Used?
LZ4 is a lossless compression algorithm created by Yann Collet that prioritizes decompression speed over compression ratio. LZ4 decompresses data at speeds exceeding 4 GB per second on modern hardware, making it ideal for real time applications, game assets, and database snapshots. Apple uses LZ4 internally in macOS for APFS filesystem compression, but the operating system does not expose a user facing tool for decompressing standalone .lz4 files. UnFox includes liblz4 in its extraction engine to handle LZ4 files natively.
How Do You Decompress an LZ4 File on Mac?
Drag the .lz4 file onto UnFox or use the File menu to browse for it. UnFox detects the LZ4 frame header and decompresses the file to the same directory or a destination you choose. Decompression is nearly instantaneous for most file sizes because of the algorithm speed. For TAR.LZ4 archives, UnFox decompresses the LZ4 layer and extracts the TAR contents automatically in one step.
How Does LZ4 Compare to Other Compression Formats?
LZ4 trades compression ratio for speed. Files compressed with LZ4 are typically larger than the same files compressed with gzip, ZSTD, or LZMA. The advantage is decompression speed: LZ4 is roughly five times faster than gzip and ten times faster than LZMA at decompression. This makes LZ4 popular for scenarios where data needs to be read frequently and storage space is less constrained, such as game development, embedded systems, and high performance computing.
LZ4 is one of 36 formats UnFox supports, alongside ZSTD, GZIP, LZMA, XZ, and other compression types. all supported archive and compression formats for Mac.
UnFox installs from the Mac App Store and handles LZ4 decompression without any configuration. download UnFox free for Mac from the App Store.