Lzip has been designed, written, and tested with great care to replace gzip and bzip2 as general-purpose compressed format for Unix-like systems.
'lzip -0' compresses about as fast as gzip, while 'lzip -9' compresses most files more than bzip2. Decompression speed is intermediate between gzip and bzip2.

Lzip provides accurate and robust 3-factor integrity checking.
Lzip provides better data recovery capabilities than gzip and bzip2.
Lzip uses the same well-defined exit status values used by bzip2, which makes it safer than compressors returning ambiguous warning values (like gzip) when it is used as a back end for other programs like tar or zutils.

The maximum dictionary size is 512 MiB so that any lzip file can be decompressed on 32-bit machines.