Abstract: Operational requirements of multibeam sonar systems result in very large volumes of datasets stored on local hard drives of operator's station. In this context, the process of archiving acquired data becomes a crucial problem. The paper investigates various lossy and lossless compression methods that can be applied to multibeam sonar data to reduce the size of acquired files without loosing relevant information. The specific character of MBS data allows applying various signal, image and video compression methods to achieve better results than when using standard compression tools. Various techniques of reordering the data were analyzed to achieve best possible compression ratio.