The most important quality of lossless compression is that it allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. This means that after decompression, the data is identical to the original, preserving all details and quality exactly
. This reversibility is crucial in applications where any loss of data would be unacceptable, such as executable programs, text documents, source code, medical images, and archival storage. Unlike lossy compression, which sacrifices some data to achieve higher compression ratios, lossless compression maintains full fidelity, making it ideal for situations requiring exact data recovery
. In summary, the defining and most important quality of lossless compression is its ability to compress data without any loss, ensuring perfect restoration of the original data after decompression
