1. File Archiving Software
2. Document Archiving Software
3. File Server Archiving Software
4. Windows File Archiving Software
5. Best File Archiving Software
6. File Archiving Solution
7. File Archiving Software Open Source

1. Publisher's Description. File Archive Manager allows users to archive files to a different location including remote PC's. This software has many features including a status window for all processes, an archive folder navigator, and a scheduler. The application also has a WAV file player that allows users to attach notes to specific WAV files.
2. Archiving software must be able to support a wide range of file types, as well as quickly search through vast quantities of data. Support for archive storage tiering. Interoperability with archive systems and media. Reporting capabilities. Retention, hold and destruction features.

An archive file is any file with the 'archive' file attribute turned on. Having a file with the archive attribute turned on simply means that the file has been flagged as needing to be backed up, or archived.

Archiving Software Overview What is Archiving Software? Archiving Software supports enterprises in retaining and rapidly retrieving structured and unstructured data over time while complying with security standards and the like. File archiving may include images, messages (e.g. IMs, social media posts, etc.), emails, and content from web pages and social sites. What Is an Archive File Used For? A backup software program, or the software tool your online backup service has you install on your computer, can use a few different methods to help determine if a file should be backed up, such as looking at the date at which it was created or modified. Rar Zip Extractor Pro - Windows 10 File Archiving Software. Rar Zip Extractor Pro - utility that allows you to work with archives fast and easy! The application includes advanced options for packing/ unpacking file archives in 7z, ZIP, RAR, TAR, ISO, GZIP and more. Create file archiving jobs from remote servers and replace stored files using HTML shortcuts. With Metalogix Archive Manager for Files, you can improve the adaptability of file archiving infrastructures with network flexibility and offsite systems and easily access archived files via the web portal from worldwide locations. File Archive Manager allows users to archive files to a different location including remote PC's. This software has many features including a status window for all processes, an archive folder.

Most of the files we encounter in normal computer use will likely have the archive attribute turned on, like the image you downloaded from your digital camera, the PDF file you just downloaded... run-of-the-mill files like that.

Terms like archive, archive file, and file archive are also used to describe the act or result of compressing and storing a collection of files and folders to a single file. There's more on that at the bottom of this page.

How Is an Archive File Created?

When someone says an archive file has been created, it doesn't mean that the contents of the file were changed, or that the file was converted into some kind of different format called archive.

What this means instead is that the archive attribute is turned on when a file is created or modified, which usually happens automatically by the program that creates or changes the file. This also means moving a file from one folder to another will turn the archive attribute on because the file has essentially been created in the new folder.

Opening or viewing a file without the archive attribute on will not turn it on or 'make' it an archive file.

When the archive attribute has been set, its value is marked as a zero (0) to indicate that it has already been backed up. A value of one (1) means the file has been modified since the last backup, and therefore still needs to be backed up.

How to Manually Change the Archive Attribute

An archive file can also be set manually to tell a backup program that the file should, or shouldn't, be backed up.

Modifying the archive attribute can be done through the command line with the attrib command. Follow that last link to learn all about how to use the attrib command to view, set, or clear the archive attribute through Command Prompt.

Another way is through the normal graphical interface in Windows. Right-click the file and choose to enter into its Properties. Once there, use the Advanced button from the General tab to clear or select the box next to File is ready for archiving. When selected, the archive attribute is set for that file.

For folders, find the same Advanced button but look for the option called Folder is ready for archiving.

What Is an Archive File Used For?

A backup software program, or the software tool your online backup service has you install on your computer, can use a few different methods to help determine if a file should be backed up, such as looking at the date at which it was created or modified.

Another way is looking at the archive attribute to understand which files were changed since the last backup. This determines which files should be backed up again to store a fresh copy, as well as which files were not changed and should not be backed up.

Once a backup program or service performs a full backup on every file in a folder, going forward, it saves time and bandwidth to do incremental backups or differential backups so you're never backing up data that's already backed up.

Because the archive attribute is applied when a file has changed, the backup software can simply back up all the files with the attribute turned on — in other words, only the files you need backed up, which are the ones that you've changed or updated.

Then, once those have been backed up, whatever software that's doing the backup will clear the attribute. Once cleared, it's enabled again when the file has been modified, which causes the backup software to back it up again. This continues over and over to ensure that your modified files are always being backed up.

Some programs may modify a file but never turn on the archive bit. This means that using a backup program that relies solely on reading the archive attribute status may not be 100% accurate at backing up modified files. Fortunately, most backup tools don't only rely on this indication.

What Are File Archives?

A 'file archive' might sound identical to an 'archive file' but there is a notable difference regardless of how you write the term.

File Archiving Software

File compression tools (often called file archivers) like 7-Zip and PeaZip are able to compress one or more files and/or folders to a single file with just one file extension. This makes it much easier to store all of that content in one place or to share multiple files with someone.

The top three most common archive file types are ZIP, RAR, and 7Z. These and others like ISO are called file archives or simply archives, regardless of whether the file attribute is set.

It's common for online software downloads and backup programs to archive files to an archive format. Downloads typically come in one of those big three formats and an archive of a disc is often stored in the ISO format. However, backup programs might use their own proprietary format and append a different file extension to the file than the ones just mentioned; others might not even use a suffix at all.

The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of file archivers. Please see the individual products' articles for further information. They are neither all-inclusive nor are some entries necessarily up to date. Unless otherwise specified in the footnotes section, comparisons are based on the stable versions—without add-ons, extensions or external programs.

• 1Archivers
  • 1.4Archive format support

Document Archiving Software

Archivers[edit]

Note: Archivers names in purple are no longer in development.

General information[edit]

Basic general information about the archivers: creator/company, license/price etc.

File Server Archiving Software

Operating system support[edit]

The operating systems the archivers can run on without emulation or compatibility layer. Linux Ubuntu's own GUI Archive manager, for example, can open and create many archive formats (including Rar archives) even to the extent of splitting into parts and encryption and ability to be read by the native program. This is presumably a 'compatibility layer.'

Notes:

Windows File Archiving Software

1. ^ A separate 64-bit Windows x64 Edition version is also available.
2. ^ The Unix-like system port is known as p7zip. p7zip also is provided by FreeDOS.
3. ^ A Windows Mobile release (version 9.05-alpha onward) is available.
4. ^ The programs for other platforms are called Unace, do not have the same GUI, and can only perform decompression.
5. ^ WinRAR is for Windows, RAR for other platforms.
6. ^ This program also has a POSIX version available.
7. ^ General Windows CE version.
8. ^ Also Acorn RISC OS, Atari, MVS, OS/2, VM/CMS, VMS and others.

Archiver features[edit]

Information about what common archiver features are implemented natively (without third-party add-ons).

Notes:

Best File Archiving Software

1. ^ Application is only for decompression.
2. ^GNU tar calls the external programs gzip and bzip2 to perform compression; these external programs usually come with systems that contain GNU tar.
3. ^ Allows adding a variable amount of redundancy for much better error recovery. See also RAR (file format).
4. ^ Extracting/adding file and/or directory names into archive in either UTF-7, UTF-8 or UTF-16/UCS-2 encoding to support single file/directory name which contains characters from different languages. More recent versions of the zip file format have support for Unicode filenames.
5. ^ In WinRAR 3.60, when opening 7-Zip archives which contains Unicode file/directory names, they will not be displayed correctly. There will be no problem extracting them, however.
6. ^ Does support Unicode names, but not under the default (initial) option settings: the user must tick 'Use OEM conversion for filenames' under 'General' on the 'Miscellaneous' tab in the Configuration dialog to enable Unicode name support. Full support for Unicode files names by default is supported only for 7-Zip and RAR archive formats.
7. ^ Commandline batch compression is available only for ZIP and ALZ formats.
8. ^ UTF-8 file/path-names support was completed in release 3.0.1 on Unix systems, and in release 5.8.0 on Windows systems. GUI UTF-8 support for full internationalization of the application was completed in release 2.2.0. Optionally, extended characters can be set to be replaced by jolly '?' character for exporting scripts to legacy systems; scripts creation screen informs if commands are ANSI-safe, OEM-codepage-safe (on Windows), or requires UTF-8 compliant environment to run (system, command interpreter, etc).^[16]
9. ^ Commandline batch compression and expansion requires free add-on software downloaded from the WinZip website.^[1]
10. ^ Peazip supports file encryption and file name encryption, although only in certain types of archives, including its own Pea format, 7-zip, zip and Arc.
11. ^ Many shells have built-in zip file support. Windows Explorer has 'Send To'->'ZIP-compressed folder'.
12. ^ Since version 3.0 (2008).

Archive format support[edit]

Reading[edit]

Information about what archive formats the archivers can read. External links lead to information about support in future versions of the archiver or extensions that provide such functionality. Note that gzip, bzip2 and xz are rather compression formats than archive formats.

Notes:

File Archiving Solution

1. ^ Used to, but no longer does, due to technical and legal issues.
2. ^ Tar implementations call external programs (like compress, gzip or bzip2 or any other programs working with abstract streams and supporting the '-d' option) to perform (de)compression, and allowing you to implement your own filters^[2]. These external programs may be shipped with your Operating System.
3. ^ GNU tar lets you implement your own filters [3], allowing you to use other compression programs (p7zip, ...) and filters (GPG, ...).
4. ^ Starting from version 11.
5. ^ Requires external program. More info
6. ^ Archive Utility itself is unable to open ISO files, but Disk Utility, which also comes with Mac OS X, is able to mount them as virtual disks.
7. ^ Requires external program.[4]
8. ^ Only partial support for reading proprietary SITX format. [5]
9. ^ FreeARC uses .arc as its filename extension, but this format is not the same as the traditional ARC file.
10. ^ Supports these formats as compression stream of other archive formats like tar.bz2 or iso.xz but does not support the format as an archive itself.
11. ^ B1 Free Archiver for Android and B1 Online Archiver support ARJ format.

Writing[edit]

Information about what archive formats the archivers^[5] can write and create. External links lead to information about support in future versions of the archiver or extensions that provide such functionality. Note that gzip, bzip2 and xz are rather compression formats than archive formats.

Notes:

File Archiving Software Open Source

1. ^ Tar implementations call the external programs gzip and bzip2, 7z, xz, ... to perform compression; these external programs usually come with systems that contain tar.
2. ^ Requires rar.exe from WinRAR.
3. ^ Requires external program(if you are using WinZip 11.1 or earlier). More info
4. ^ Requires Ace32.exe from WinAce.
5. ^ The Extractor and XAD are not included in this list because they only expand archives.
6. ^ ALZip can also write to the following formats: BH, JAR, and LZH
7. ^ Updating archives is not supported.[6]
8. ^ Requires external program.[7]
9. ^ Stuffit supported file formats [8]
10. ^ Ark is a front-end only and requires appropriate command-line programs be installed. Programs like bzip2, gzip, tar, zip usually come with systems that contain Ark; writing in .rar format requires a commercial program. [9]
11. ^ Xarchiver is a front-end only and requires appropriate command-line programs be installed. Programs like bzip2, gzip, tar, zip usually come with systems that contain Xarchiver; writing in .rar format requires a commercial program. [10][11]
12. ^ Archive Manager is a front-end only and requires appropriate command-line programs be installed. Programs like bzip2, gzip, tar, zip usually come with systems that contain Archive Manager. writing in .rar format requires a commercial program.[12]
13. ^ If there are more than one, files must be grouped in a .tar before being compressed.
14. ^ supports the formats as stream compression of other archive format and can create compressed format like tar.bz2 or iso.xz but cannot create an archive in these formats
15. ^ it is possible to open war and jar files to extract e add/replace file; files war and jar are still valid after that

Uncommon archive format support[edit]

PeaZip has full support for various LPAQ and PAQ formats, QUAD and BALZ (highly efficient ROLZ based compressors), FreeArc format, and for its native PEA format.

7-Zip includes read support for .msi, cpio and xar, plus Apple's dmg/HFS disk images and the deb/.rpm package distribution formats; beta versions (9.07 onwards) have full support for the LZMA2-compressed .xz format.^[17]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^'ftp.gnome.org'. ftp.acc.umu.se. Retrieved 2019-08-12.
2. ^http://www.betterzip.com/version-history/
3. ^'Latest Product Updates - Support Center - PKWARE Support Site'. Retrieved 2 July 2016.
4. ^'StuffIt Updates'. Smith Micro Software. Retrieved 2015-03-15.
5. ^'StuffIt Deluxe English|German|Japanese'. Smith Micro Software. Retrieved 2011-12-01.
6. ^'StuffIt Deluxe Mac French'. Smith Micro Software. Retrieved 2011-12-01.
7. ^'StuffIt Windows (Standard)'. Smith Micro Software. Retrieved 2011-12-01.
8. ^'StuffIt Deluxe Windows'. Smith Micro Software. Retrieved 2011-12-01.
9. ^'StuffIt Deluxe Windows French'. Smith Micro Software. Retrieved 2011-12-01.
10. ^'StuffIt Deluxe Windows German'. Smith Micro Software. Retrieved 2011-12-01.
11. ^'Latest changes in WinRAR'.
12. ^'WinRAR and RAR support site'. Retrieved 2 July 2016.
13. ^'Command Line ZIP Interface - use scripts to automate zip tasks'. Archived from the original on 27 February 2012. Retrieved 2 July 2016.
14. ^'PeaZip FAQ OS X support'. Retrieved 6 October 2013.
15. ^'RAR - Android Apps on Google Play'. Retrieved 2 July 2016.
16. ^'Learn more - PeaZip free file archiver utility'. Retrieved 2 July 2016.
17. ^'HISTORY of the 7-Zip'. www.7-zip.org. 2010-04-15. Retrieved 2010-04-24.

Further reading[edit]

• Maximum Compression site benchmarking compressors for several filetypes (text, executable, jpeg etc.).
• Kingsley G. Morse Jr., 'Compression Tools Compared', Linux Journal, issue 137, September 2005
• Patrick Schmid, Achim Roos, (March 10, 2010) 'Four Compression And Archiving Solutions Compared', Tom's Hardware