Dateiliste

Are you still compressing and archiving your data as zip files?
In that case you might want to have a look at 7-Zip.

Not only does 7-Zip compress better. The free open-source product comes with a complete file manager, command line utility, and documentation.

The software understands a variety of compression methods, including the zip file format.

7-Zip supports many features, including (taken from Wikipedia):

• Support for the 256-bit AES cipher. Encryption can be enabled for both files and the 7z directory structure. When the directory structure is encrypted, users are required to supply a password to see the filenames contained within the archive, unless only the data was encrypted but not the filenames. WinZip-developed AES encryption standard is also available in 7-Zip to encrypt ZIP archives with AES 256-bit, but it doesn't offer filename encryption as in 7z archives.

• Volumes of dynamically variable sizes, allowing use for backups on removable media such as writable CDs and DVDs.

• Usability as a basic orthodox file manager when used in 2-panel mode.

• Multiple CPU / core / threading settings can be configured.

• The ability to attempt to open EXE files as archives, allowing the decompression of data from inside many "SetUp" or "Installer" or "Extract" type programs without having to launch them.

• The ability to unpack archives with corrupted filenames, renaming the files as required.

• The ability to create self-extracting archives although cannot do so for multi-volume archives.

The software fully unveils its skills when data is compressed with the 7z archiving format. 7z is 7-Zip's native file type.

These are the main features of the 7z format (taken from the 7z Wikipedia article):

• Open, modular architecture which allows any compression, conversion, or encryption method to be stacked.

• High compression ratios (depending on the compression method used)

• Strong Rijndael/AES-256 encryption.

• Large file support (up to approximately 16 exabytes).

• Unicode file names

• Support for solid compression, where multiple files of like type are compressed within a single stream, in order to exploit the combined redundancy inherent in similar files.

• Compression and encryption of archive headers.

The format's open architecture allows additional future compression methods to be added to the standard.

Since 7-Zip contains a file manager too, this makes it a good replacement for other zipping and archiving software.


Links:
7-Zip's homepage (includes a download link)
7-Zip on Wikipedia