7-Zip is a free open-source file archiver, extractor and manager which supports most popular compression formats.
A nice feature in 7-Zip is its file splitting option which allows you to divide one large file into a few smaller ones. It can be useful in case it is necessary to send a large file via e-mail or upload it on a website with certain file size limits.
Apart from that, 7-Zip can encrypt archive files using AES-256 algorithm which is capable of using cryptographic keys of up to 256 bits and is considered one of the top ciphers.
7-Zip doesn't eat up system resources and can be easily switched to background mode. It's interface is intuitive, however, some users believe it is quite plain and primitive.
Apparently, 7-Zip is not as popular as WinRar or WinZIP and doesn't have a whole lot of features to mark it out from file archivers of its kind. Still, it offers all the necessary options needed in an archive manager and it's performance is just great.
Pros
- Free
- Open-source
- Cross-platform
- Offers high compression ratio
- Uses powerful AES-256 encryption
- Doesn't use many resources
- Nice file splitting option
- Localizations for 79 languages
Cons
- Plain user-interface
- Compressing to .7z can be rather slow
This program is very useful because it lets me to practice my work. I like this program a lot.
Thank you for putting something out easy to use for folks that don't under all there in to know about compressing files. A great program for those that do. Also WinZip and WINrar are not making money on it.
Good compressing zip program.