7-Zip, the best free alternative to popular zip programs

7-Zip 4.57 is free software developed by Igor Pavlov. You can use 7-Zip on any computer, including a computer in a commercial organization. You don't need to register or pay for 7-Zip.

The main features of 7-Zip are
  • Powerful file manager: The 7-Zip File Manager is a program for manipulating files and folders.
  • High compression ratio with high speed of operations: Compression and decompression performance of 7-zip is at par with any free/commercial tool available in the market.
  • Large number of supported archive formats: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, RAR, CAB, ARJ, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB, LZH, SPLIT (like 001, 002, …), CHM, ISO, COMPOUND (like msi, doc, xls, ppt), WIM, and NSIS (exe)
  • Command line support
7-Zip creates fully ZIP compatible archives, which can be decompressed by any ZIP compatible decompression utility. During compression 7-Zip can use one of the following ZIP compression methods:

  • 0 - Store
  • 8 - Deflate
  • 9 - Deflate64
  • 12 - BZip2
7-Zip v4.57 can extract any files from ZIP archive that were compressed with one of the following methods:

  • 0 - Store
  • 1 - Shrink
  • 6 - Implode
  • 8 - Deflate
  • 9 - Deflate64
  • 12 - BZip2
However, there is a limitation. 7-Zip v4.57 doesn't support Zip multivolume archives.

7z is a new archive format, providing following main features.

  • Open architecture: 7z has an open architecture, so it can support any new compression methods.
  • High compression ratio
  • Strong AES-256 encryption
  • Ability to use any compression, conversion or encryption method
  • Supports files with sizes up to 16000000000 GB
  • Unicode file names
  • Solid compression
  • Archive headers compression
Overall, 7-zip is a must have program on any Windows based computer.

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