Business Intelligence

Five easy-to-use archiving/compression tools

By , July 18, 2012, 8:52 AM

  • Introduction

    NOTE: If you'd prefer to view this information as a blog post, check out this entry in our Five Apps blog.

    Most platforms have their own built-in tools for archiving and compressing. But in some cases, those tools aren't enough. So it's good to know that there are other applications to pick up the slack. Let's dive in and examine several of these, so you can enjoy an alternative archiving and/or compression tool.

    Photo: iStockphoto.com/paparazzit

  • 7-Zip

    7-Zip is one of the best of the free archiving/compression tools available across platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac). Not only is 7-Zip free, it's also open source and offers every feature you could want.

  • 7-Zip

    7-Zip supports the 7z, XZ, BZIP2, GZIP, TAR, ZIP, and WIM formats for packing/unpacking and ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DEB, DMG, FAT, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MBR, MSI, NSIS, NTFS, RAR, RPM, SquashFS, UDF, VHD, WIM, XAR, and Z for packing only. 7-Zip also includes encryption utilities for compression.

  • PeaZip

    PeaZip is another free tool that offers plenty of features and an easy-to-use GUI. It supports more than 150 file formats. PeaZip also offers strong encryption, two-factor authentication, an encrypted password manager, secure deletion, a duplicate finder, the ability to save backup scripts, and much more.

  • PeaZip

    Once you've installed it, you'll notice seamless Explorer integration. PeaZip actually borrows some of the technology from 7 Zip.

  • WinRAR

    WinRAR is an archive manager that can also serve as a data backup tool (though you shouldn't depend on such a tool for critical backups).

  • WinRAR

    WinRAR is the only non-free tool in this gallery. This particular archiving application will set you back around $21.00 USD per license (with breaks for bulk licensing purchases). See this page for more details.

  • File Roller

    File Roller is the official archiving tool for the GNOME desktop. It supports numerous formats, has a great GUI, integrates into the Nautlius file manager, and can even work with ISO images and installation packages (such as .rpm and .deb).

  • File Roller

    This manager is free and comes preinstalled on any GNOME-based Linux distribution.

  • Ark

    Ark is the default archiving tool for the KDE destkop. With Ark, archives can be viewed, extracted, created, and modified. Ark can handle numerous formats, such as tar, gzip, bzip2, zip, rar, and lha.

  • Ark

    Ark offers seamless integration with the default KDE file manager, Konqueror. (Just install the Konqueror Integration plugin available in the kdeaddons package.)

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Introduction

NOTE: If you'd prefer to view this information as a blog post, check out this entry in our Five Apps blog.

Most platforms have their own built-in tools for archiving and compressing. But in some cases, those tools aren't enough. So it's good to know that there are other applications to pick up the slack. Let's dive in and examine several of these, so you can enjoy an alternative archiving and/or compression tool.

Photo: iStockphoto.com/paparazzit

About Jack Wallen

Jack Wallen is an award-winning writer for Techrepublic and Linux.com. As an avid promoter/user of the Linux OS, Jack tries to convert as many users to open source as possible. His current favorite flavor of Linux is Bodhi Linux (a melding of Ubuntu ...

6 comments
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CyGuyJG
CyGuyJG

It's portable (and includes encryption).

Dyalect
Dyalect

my tool of choice. why would anyone pay for winzip/winrar is beyond me. plus windows has archive creation/extraction built right into the o/s.

net.minder
net.minder

... the Password Protection feature that's present does not really work as it should. I hope they'll get around to fixing it one day.

konservativ
konservativ

I have used this for years, installed and IZArc2Go.

sh10453
sh10453

You must be working for Babylon. This program installs Babylon search bar, changes the home page, changes the default search engine, and other CrapWare, even when you uncheck all the buttons, and tell it NO. Not worth bothering with this program. I HATE Babylon for doing that. Thanks to Revo Uninstaller to root out every trace of Babylon on my machines. Keep it up Babylon. Ever heard of the word "ethics"? ... Great way to lose potential customers!

konservativ
konservativ

I've never had this problem with IZArc. I'll give you this much, that it has become increasingly important to be aware of where you download freeware from. Just see what happens, when you update Java and overlook unchecking Ask.com search bar. In some download sites you have the Babylon, Yahoo and whatever search bars. Plus you sometimes get something else than you thought you were downloading. Very annoying - I agree. Babylon has become even more absolete than it has ever been with the built-in translation engines in almost everything. Have you tried to find a specific driver online? Then you'll see CrapWare en mass.

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