Working with ZIP archives and the free IZArc

Many downloads - especially scripts, website templates, videos, audios and all kinds of software tools - are made available to you in some kind of archive format, being ZIP probably the most popular format. Other formats are for example: gzip, tar, 7-zip, rar, arj.

The main advantages of offering digital products for download in an archived format are that only one file needs to be downloaded and because the data is compressed (aka "packed" or "stuffed") inside these archives, the downloaded file sizes are smaller, hence the data transfer over the internet is faster and saves resources.

But before you can work with the content of such archives, you need to extract (aka "unpack") the content to a location on your computer´s hard drive. For this task you will need a software utility. You will also need the same utility to create zip archives for easy distribution of your digital products.

One of the most popular tools for Windows users is WinZip, which is a commercial tool and has a trial version. However, there are quite a few free alternative archiving utilities and one of the best ones I have found is IZArc. If you do not have this tool yet, Download IZArc Now - it´s free and beats many commercial tools.

On the following pages, you will learn with practical examples:

• how to extract zip (and other) archives
• how to create a new zip archive
• how to split a large archive file into several smaller ones
• how to recombine splitted archives

Enjoy !