File Archiving and Compression Free Software – 7-Zip
Whether you’re looking to reduce the bandwidth usage of your site or want to conserve hard drive space or even if you want to send a large file elsewhere, chances are you will need a program that will allow you to compress said files and store them in a neat package understood by many programs, free and corporate, that can manipulate such files.
7-Zip is an archival program that is compatible with several compressed formats such as ZIP, RAR, Gzip and TAR and has introduced it’s own open architecture that is known as the 7z format with LZMA compression. 7-Zip currently works in the following Windows Operating Systems 98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista with a command line port for Linux users too.
7-Zip allows users to perform several tasks for file management and file archiving, you can compress many text based documents to a fraction of their size, making them easier to send via email or keep them trim so that they occupy less space on your web server or hard drive. 7-Zip also allows you to password protect any archive with strong AES-256 encryption in 7z and ZIP formats, protecting a single or multiple files from prying eyes. Compressed archives are also convenient downloads for users, where they only need to download one file to access all the files in the archive, compressing the contents of those archives also serves to speed up downloads considerably depending on the archives contents which uses less bandwidth of your web server and users are happier to get their download faster.
And the best part of 7-Zip? It’s free software that you don’t even have to register! And it’s just as functional as many corporate solutions that would be willing to charge you hand over fist for. Unless you need paid software that performs certain functions that 7-Zip does not, save yourself a few dollars and stick with 7-Zip for now