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New Winzip in the Works
flufster writes "Today WinZip released a public beta version of WinZip 10.0, the latest version of the popular archiving software. The biggest change in this version is that the software has finally been broken into two versions - Standard and Professional, offering paying users additional functionality in the Professional version, while allowing others to use the Standard edition without an annoying nag screen.
Version 10.0 has a revamped interface designed to mimic XP's Windows Explorer, and claims to zip archives faster. The software now supports the PPMd and bzip2 compression formats, and can burn from zip archives directly to writable optical media such as CDs and DVDs. The main addition to the Pro edition is an automation feature called 'WinZip Job Wizard' which allows scheduled archiving instructions to be set. Almost all the other features we're used to now come completely free in the Standard edition."
My favorite window archiving tool: http://www.izarc.org/
I guess 7-zip is popular too. Regardless, Winzip is yesterday's news.
Or you could just get WinRar. Free upgrades and a better format to boot.
Here's some good freeware ones:
7-Zip A free, open source Windows zip utility with support for several archive formats, and comparatively great compression. Small and fast too; it's my personal choice at the moment. IZArc Not open source, but supports a few more formats ICEOWS Formerly ARJFolder, integrates very cleanly into Windows Explorer.There's more out there, but really, I can't see how Winzip is as relevant today as it was during the Win3.x days when it was the only good zip GUI out there. I guess scheduling is nice, but then again, all operating systems come with a schedular these days anyway.
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I believe RAR does what they call "solid archiving," which means that a single compression dictionary is created for the entire archive.
.tar.gz does.) For the first ZIP, specify "no compression" (sometimes called "archive only") for the degree of compression desired. No compression dictionary will be created. Then ZIP that uncompressed ZIP file, using maximum compression this time. Since you're compressing just one file, only a single compression dictionary will be created. Especially for files that have a lot of similarity to each other (like human-language text or computer-language text), there's a big savings in using a single dictionary.
.tar.gz.). ZIP managed ~17MB, double-ZIP managed ~12MB - slightly smaller than the .tar.gz distro, in fact.
ZIP doesn't do that; each file in a ZIP archive is compressed individually, with a separate compression dictionary. That hurts the compression ratio for ZIP archives that contain many files, particularly many small files, particularly many similar small files, like source code, for example. But it does mean that archive operations (like extracting or updating individual files or and adding files to or removing files from an archive) are fast and simple.
It's possible, in some cases, to dramatically increase the compression ratio ZIP achieves by ZIPing twice, emulating the "solid archive" method. (This is also what using
I tried this with some source code archives and reduced ZIPs from (IIRC) ~150KB to ~90KB. Not really a worthwhile absolute savings, these days, but a huge improvement, percentage-wise. I also tried this with the Windows distribution of Emacs (which is distributed as
Doing this is a little clumsy, but it can offer a much-improved compression ratio in a format that virtually every Windows user already has access to.