Favorite Compression Software

[yordan 10]

I mainly use 7 zip file manager, it extracts everything I need and it's free

What I love is also the fact that it has a portable version, so you can put it on your USB and use it at a friend's home.And it can compress in "tar" format, which makes your backup directly readable on a Unix machine.

[mahesh2k 0]

Okay just installed 7-zip from the portableapps site. I found that it's easy to extract into any directory. So i moved it from zip drive to hard disk. I found that it has no registry settings and is good for the computer. I wanted to add it in right context menu like zipgenius but then realized that two programs for the same task is boring thing. So just kept the 7zip as backup program for USB and for random hard disk usage. I'm sure i'm going to use it for some tasks of mine in future. From the tests on file format my opinion is surely changed for the 7zip software and now that it is free and portable, much better competitor for my current zipgenius install. I just tested the compression of 7zip and zipgenius. I found that 7zip was taking more space for tar.gz files in comparison to zipgenius. I found zipgenius taking few bytes more than 7zip for normal zip file formats. So i guess it may or may not depend on strength of CPU/RAM for this. But the results did vary for me. Both are capable of extracting RAR archives which are quite common in file sharing networks and docstoc type of sites. They can't do RAR compression because that format is proprietary and not for other apps. Most of the file format compression is supported by both the programs. I thought it's better to check all supported. But only found the difference between two of them.