I frequently see other peoples computers when asked to resolve a problem or conflict. One tool I see rarely-but-wish-I-saw-more-often on these computers is a free file compression tool called 7zip. I think it is one of the best tools nobody has heard of.
You can go get it from here: http://www.7-zip.org/
For those of you whom just left on that link, I’ll wait until you return…
.
..
Your back! Good!
Here are some quick reasons why you want it
- It can compress multi-gig files / directories without slowing down (as the file size increases).
- It can handle UNIX/Linux style .gz or tar.gz or bzip files
- It can unpack RAR files
- It has a nice right-click extract feature
- Its GNU Free Software
- Its lightweight and not bloaty
- It is fast enough for me.
- With respect to free software, its stable and well rooted (good community mass, “mature” project)
I like 7zip because it is very fast to access and get things done. It’s right at your fingertips. 7zip follows a proper workflow without frilly interfaces as far as I’m concerned. When I’m thinking about compressing or uncompressing a file, I’d say 98% of the time, I have the file in front of me. I definitely don’t want to wait for WinZip to tell me that my copy is unregistered and make me wait 30 seconds. How do people put up with these annoyances?
Here is my use-case for example: I just download XYZ.zip item from the web. Now I need to unpack it. I wasn’t thinking about what format it was while it was downloading really, just that I found it and where it was to be written. I don’t have control over what format other people have placed it in. It could be in anything, from RAR, gzip, bzip2. Can you unzip gzip on windows? This tool can uncompress most all of ‘em. I have yet to find something in real practice that this tool can’t do. (not to say that it supports ALL the formats, but just ALL the good ones commonly used..) I mean, does anyone still use LHA anymore? I haven’t seen it since my MS-DOS days in the mid-90s.
Usually, I want to right click on it, find the menu which says “Extract to new folder named XYZ” and be done with it. No opening, no navigating. Two clicks.
I enjoy the true capabilities of this utility. By using the previously described right-click context menu, I can quickly have access to the inner hooks of the program. To begin, navigate in windows explorer and right-click on a file or folder that I’m interested in compressing. When I find the file-item that I’m interested in compressing, I can right-click on it, select from the 7-zip menu “add to archive”.
I recommend taking the time to name your archived something appropriate. I don’t like spaces or other characters that Windows and other operating systems utilize for directory listings. Some people feel the need to use and / in their naming conventions and it’s a bad idea. I also recommend that you utilize the archive format “Zip”, compression level “normal” and the compression method of “deflate”. I use a dictionary size of 32 KB and a word size of 32.
Once you’ve decided on your parameters that you’re going to use press the OK button.
A status dialog box will appear as your archived is compressed and I’ve made a screen capture of that below. The screen capture shows the elapsed time, the remaining time, the size of selected material to compress and the speed at which it is compressing. You can choose to place this item in the background if you have an archive that’s big enough. You can also, should you choose to, paused the creation of the archive.
One trick I used to estimate my final archive size on larger jobs, is to wait for the file to compressed to about 10%. Then I open Windows File Explorer and navigate to the directory in which the compression archive is being formed. With the view set in Windows File Explorer to “detail mode”, take the total space the archive is currently using and multiply it by 10. This will give you a fair estimate as to how large the final archive size will be.
I hope you enjoy using 7zip is much as I do, or least as much as it’s healthy to enjoy using a file compression utility.