http://www.winzip.com/index.htm winzip
http://www.powerarchiver.com/ osx powerarchiver

http://www.7-zip.org/

http://www.rarlab.com/rar_add.htm

Archiving files

Why archive files? There are a few good reasons to do so. Back in the day when harddrives were expensive and space was at a premium, it made sense to compress files that were not used everyday to save space. It also made sense to take many files and put them in one archive to storage or transmission reasons. Back when data was transmitted over phone lines or even isdn ( if you were lucky enough to have that) you wanted to transmit the least amount of data. In compressing folders you concatenated many files into one and made the size smaller.

Over the years there have been quite a few archive utilities. The venerable zip , the new standard rar, and one new addition, 7zip. Each one of these has good and bad traits.

Zip is now incorporated into the last few editions of windows, it is not the fastest or the best compression.

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