I use 7zip for compression and encrypting folder's I have. However, I noticed recently that, say the folder I wish to compress and encrypt has 29,805,050,333 bytes. Then, I convert the folder into a 7zip archive with encryption.
Then, I unzip this 7zip archive and (am supposed to) get back a second folder with the original contents. However, comparing the original folder to the folder that resulted from extracting the 7zip archive, I see the new extracted folder has 29,805,822,344 bytes.
There is a difference of around 800,000 bytes before and after extracting the folder. What is 7zip doing that causes me to lose these bytes? Is it meta data?