Why Binary Files are Needed

Most digital data is stored
in binary files.
Pure text files are somewhat rare
(probably less than 2% of the data in the world).
There are several reasons why binary files are used.

I. Input and output are much faster using
binary data.
Converting a 32-bit integer to characters takes time.
Not a great deal of time,
but if a file (such as an image file) contains
millions of numbers
the accumulated conversion
time is significant.
Computer games would slow to a crawl if their
data were stored in character form.

II. A binary file is usually very much
smaller than a text file that contains
an equivalent amount of data.
For image, video, and audio data this is important.
Small files save storage space, can be
transmitted faster, and are processed faster.
IO with smaller files is faster, too, since there
are fewer bytes to move.

III. Some kinds of data can’t easily be represented
as characters.
For example, the bytecodes of a Java class file or the
machine language of an executable file.
You may not usually think of this as data, but of course,
it is.
The Java compiler reads an input file (a source file) and
writes a binary data file containing its results
(the bytecode file).