Sooner or later, every PC user has to deal with such files as archives and archivers – programs that work with this type of files, allowing you to compress information, pack it into a single file, and perform all the reverse actions for these operations. Archivers have gained popularity because they allow you to significantly save disk space and transfer many files as a single structure.
7-Zip is a freeware archiver program. It is one of the most popular applications at the moment, due to its simple interface, free distribution terms, support for major archive formats and high file compression.
File compression (compression)
According to the tests, the archiver compresses 7z and zip formats better than other programs that support these file compression formats (for example, WinRar). However, it’s impossible to say for sure that this program is superior to others by a percentage, since it largely depends on the format of the source files. For example, multimedia data is compressed almost equally.
Packing and unpacking:
7z, BZIP2 (.bz2 .bzip2 .tbz2 .tbz), GZIP (.gz .gzip .tgz), WIM (.wim .swm), XZ (.xz .txz), TAR, ZIP/ZIP64 (.zip .zipx .jar .xpi .odt .ods .docx .xlsx .epub).
Unpacking only:
APM, AR (.ar .a .deb .lib), ARJ, CAB, CHM (.chm .chw .chi .chq), COMPOUND (.msi .msp .doc .xls .ppt), CPIO, CramFS, DMG, FAT, HFS, HXS (.hxs .hxi .hxr .hxq .hxw .lit), iHEX, ISO (.iso, .img), LZH (.lzh . lha), LZMA, MBR, MsLZ, Mub, NSIS, NTFS (.ntfs .img), RAR (.rar .r00), RPM, PPMD, SPLIT (.001 .002 …), SquashFS, UDF (.udf .iso .img), UEFIc (.scap), UEFIs (.uefif), VHD, XAR (.xar .pkg), Z (.z .taz).
Distinctive features:
- 2-10% higher compression ratio of ZIP and GZIP archives created with 7-Zip than PKZip and WinZip;
- high compression ratio in its own 7z format;
- creation of self-extracting archives (for 7z format);
- AES-256 encryption (for 7z format);
- integration into the Windows shell;
- plug-in for FAR Manager;
- GUI and command line versions.