File archivers

A file archiver is a computer program that combines a number of files together into one archive file, or a series of archive files, for easier transportation or storage. Many file archivers employ Archive formats that provide lossless data compression to reduce the size of the archive which is often useful for transferring a large number of individual files over a high latency network like the Internet.

The process of making an archive file is called archiving or packing. Reconstructing the original files from the archive is termed unarchiving, unpacking or extracting.

Several years ago, archivers could typically understand only one file format, the one they were designed for. These days, there are quite a few archivers that understand several file formats. Many of them still can only create and update one type, but they can at least read several others.

Most of the utilities listed here handle the ubiquitous zip file format, and many (if not all of the software listed) can decompress files using a variety of file compression formats.

7-Zip is a free file archiver with high compression ratio in 7z format with LZMA compression.

TUGZip is a freeware archiving utility that provides support for a wide range of compressed files.

IZArc is a freeware file archiver for Microsoft Windows supporting many archive formats.