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Also known as: overhead, encoding inflation
The extra bytes an encoding adds on top of the original file. uuencode and Base64 both expand data by roughly a third, so a 4GB file consumed over 5GB of transfer. yEnc cuts this to about one or two percent by escaping only problem bytes. Article headers add a little more, which is why downloaded byte counts always exceed the finished file size.
Browse all terms in Binaries, Encoding & Repair, or see the full Usenet glossary.