BEST ARCHIVE TOOL In recent years the software industry has seen a revival of archive (file compression) tools that are easier to use, more efficient, and more powerful than ever. RARLab's WinRAR represents the best of this new breed of archive tools, with an unparalleled breadth and depth of high-end features and superior user interface. WinRAR is a $29 shareware program (as of Fall 2005) by Alexander Roshal of RARLabs which includes a Lifetime license, and its full-featured trial version offers an ample 40-day evaluation. WinRAR provides power where you need it in an archive tool — in its core feature set. WinRAR provides complete support of RAR and ZIP files, unpacks 7z, ACE, ARJ, BZ2, CAB, GZ, ISO, JAR, LZH, TAR, UUE, Z. Among WinRAR features are strong compression, good archiving speed, multi-volume support, encryption, self-extracting modules, and backup facilities. In the end, after reviewing over a dozen of the very best archive tools, WinRAR proved to have the best overall feature set and performance, and wins our award for Best Archive Tool. In addition, our freeware award winner, TUGZip, and our Open Source award winner, 7-Zip, are both excellent tools which continue to improve; if you only do occasional creation and extraction of archive files, or if you are an Open Source supporter, we have no hesitation at all in recommending these tools for your complete archive management needs. RARLab has agreed to offer members of DonationCoder.com a 20% discount on purchases of WinRAR, and has generously donated 10 copies of WinRAR for us to give away to our members. Review by Zaine Ridling  of The Great Software List

THE UTILITY OF ARCHIVING

In the late 1980s, before the internet was on desktops and going online meant sharing files through a BBS (Bulletin Board Service), understanding and using archives was essential to one's activities. Files were archived using PKZip, originally created by Phil Katz, founder of PKWARE, and the command line before WinZip took the scene by storm in the early 1990s. Command line archiving is still used by many, primarily power users, although using the command is about as difficult as memorizing a phone number: once you learn it, it's a snap. WinZip brought ease of use and simplicity to archiving, and almost overnight, the masses followed and ZIP was standardized.

The software landscape is flooded with ZIP applications, many which are freeware. Do we need any more ZIP applications? "The developer community seems to think so," Marc Orchant answers sardonically. We will always welcome better software, but there's a wide gulf between the very good ones and the not-so-good ones, and when judging to find the best, quality always trumps price.

If you've visited Usenet or been on a warez site in the last dozen years, the predominant compression format is RAR, and the reasons center on RAR's reliability, volume splitting/joining, and Parity file data that allows damaged or partially downloaded files to be fully recovered. That means that if a transmission error occurs when downloading a file, you can still recover the entire file (up to a point). RAR's long-term, proven stability pervades the newsgroups. With virtually unlimited-size capability, RAR and 7z formats remove practical limits on allowable archive sizes. If you don't believe it, try archiving 6G of files and see how long it takes to open the resulting archive. With today's processors, you won't want to do it.

Perhaps one of the most frequent uses of archiving is to: (1) reduce size of email attachments, (2) decompress RAR, ZIP, 7z and other files downloaded from internet — the smaller the file size, the more compressed it is, the less time spent downloading it, and (3) create new archives in RAR, ZIP, and 7z file formats. The most practical reason for archiving, beyond data compression, is file aggregation; that is, archiving: storing many files into one output file, or more simply, turning the many into one. Thus, an entire folder of 3,500 photos can become Landscapes-01.rar, Landscapes-01.7z, or Landscapes-01.zip, and with the ability to add comments/notes to an archive, you (or others) can easily know what comments, info, content description, or any information input for any specific archive created.

Archive tools are also frequently used to split files, add error detection and correction information, and provide security through encryption.

In the age of 500-gigabyte hard drives, archiving is less important than ever and more important than ever. One reason is that the BBS world became what we now know as the internet, and we are all connected. Eventually you are going to share and exchange files for some purpose. No matter the device used — bittorrent, Usenet, email, network, instant message, etc. — the most efficient way share files online is to compress them into an archive. There are numerous formats (compression algorithms) that have been written over the last three decades, but the three most popular today on the Windows platform are ZIP (by far the most common), RAR (gaining popularity), and the relatively new 7z, which addresses some of ZIP's weaknesses and limitations and aims to succeed ZIP.

 

A WORD ON RAR, 7z, and PPMd FORMATS

Although formats are discussed throughout this review, it is important to remember we are rating the archiving program itself along with its format support, not solely its default format. For example, one may use WinACE and only use its ACE format. However, it is important to know what formats WinACE does and does not support. Although we include relative compression speed and ratio for each program, users must decide whether they are factors worth considering.

RAR is a proprietary format licensed by RARLabs. Interestingly, WinRAR started as Eugene Roshal's university doctoral dissertation. The file-extension .RAR stands for Roshal ARchiver in the same way that the PK in PKZip stands for Phil Katz. Roshal has never hidden the fact that WinRAR was built for internet file sharing.

The RAR Wikipedia article states:

The encoder (the main Windows version known as WinRAR) is distributed as shareware, but Roshal has released the decoder's source code under a license that allows free distribution and modification, on condition that it is not reverse-engineered to build a compatible encoder. The encoding method is held to be proprietary, but compatible programs for decompression are available for several platforms, such as the open-source 7-Zip.

RAR/PAR encoding uses a Reed-Solomon error correction scheme, so you can send a few additional (small) files and the data blocks within them can be used to replace any lost data blocks from the original set. This proves adroit when using FTP or downloading files from online.

For those wanting an Open Source solution to archiving in their future, 7z is the format of choice. It has an open, modular architecture, high compression ratio, strong encryption, support for large file sizes, Unicode file names, and solid archive support (where multiple files can share compression information, resulting results than if each file was compressed independently). If true, you may ask then why doesn't the free 7-Zip application then win this review? Because at present, 7-Zip is not a complete application, does not include critical features like volume splitting features that other apps like WinRAR and PowerArchiver support, and its development by Igor Pavlov has been slower than expected. Such factors were determinative in favor of WinRAR. Worse, other applications that support 7z have exposed its inherent weakness: slow compression speed for large archives.

Thus the criticism most often heard of 7z format is that while it provides good compression of multimedia and photo files, it is weak when compressing text/xml/html/ini files, and moreover, its slow compression speed (in PowerArchiver, archiving large files using 7z format is often so slow that it could be considered useless for large files). From our research, we found this due primarily to the LZMA format which is under active development and revision rather than specific to any one program using 7z format. Some were faster others, but all were slow. The 7z format's speed will improve as its algorithm is refined. For now, RAR is much faster.

On the other hand, WinRAR (the application) presently provides the most robust solution with good archiving speed and its high compression ratio, second only to 7z. Our own tests found a statistically insignificant difference (Less than 1%) between the two formats when archiving large files.

The fact that the RAR encoding algorithm is proprietary is an issue worth considering. It means that, unlike ZIP and 7z and almost all other compression algorithms, only the official WinRAR programs can create RAR archives (although other programs can decompress them). Some would argue that this is unhealthy for the software industry and that standardizing on an open format would be better for everyone in the long run. But for most users, these issues are academic; WinRAR offers great support for both ZIP and RAR formats.

In its latest version, WinZip Pro offers a new level of maximum compression, called PPMd. Mark Nelson of Visicron explains that PPMd compression is "a specialized form of compression based on Markov modeling. In general, PPMd predicts the probability of a given character based on a given number of characters that immediately precede it." PPM is conceptually simple, but computationally intensive, taking anywhere from 10-12 times longer to compress the same files using ZIP. Like 7z, you're given an either-or choice — high compression ratios that consume time or low compression ratios that save time. In our real-world tests, using WinZip Pro's PPMd compression level resulted in a file only 13% smaller than normal ZIP compression. Not worth ten times the wait except on small files, and thus making RAR a better solution for archiving large files.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD ARCHIVER?

That depends on how you intend to use it, and few are able to keep just one archiver on their desktop for all their needs. What makes an archiver excellent is the totality of its strengths and the reduction of weaknesses. For example, archivers like WinRAR and PowerArchiver are mature and have worked hard to strengthen their feature sets and increase usability while one like ALZip is a simple program that works well within its own design by delimiting its feature set. If you are going to be working with relatively small files will shared via email, then ZIP will likely be your preferred format: it's the most widely supported and fastest type of archive to compress. If however, you work with larger file sets, upload files to Usenet, or if you need volume splitting and self-executable abilities, then you should work with RAR format. For personal use and backup archiving purposes, you have a choice of formats, but WinRAR ensures you can freely use both formats along with 7z extraction all within one program.

Archivers are as varied as any other class of applications reviewed by DonationCoder.com. They vary wildly in their features, approaches to the user interface, and notably in format support. All support ZIP file creation and broad format extraction. But not enough yet support both RAR and 7z file creation. Why is that important? Because they are the two best formats, both of which remove old limitations, and provide exciting options for users. RAR is a proprietary format compared to 7z, which is Open Source, but both are being actively developed.

The more formats a program can handle, the better. This review confirmed that the old ZIP format we all know is showing its age, producing files that are unacceptably large. WinZip (10.x) introduces two new formats in its newest version, one of which, PPMd, can only be read using WinZip itself. This is a highly questionable move, given that the user community has settled on 7z and RAR formats for their future archives. (Millions of downloads paint the picture in this instance.) I am reminded of George Constanza's boss, Mr. Kruger on Seinfeld, who shrugged off every crisis with, "I'm not too worried about it." Every month that passes, archivers like TUGZip and 7-Zip continue to peel valuable market share from WinZip.

One feature that soon became apparent was archive speed (or compression speed). While it is not essential, slow archiving speed became tortuous to endure, and since this review focused on archiving a 1G (1084M) game application under the guise of testing the abilities and limits of various formats, it is a feature that cannot be overlooked, and developers would be wise to focus much of their effort in future versions.

Another significant feature centered on drag and drop performance. Drag and drop support is an ease-of-use issue. Most users want to sit down and start archiving without reading the manual, and clumsy implementations of either their shell integration or drag and drop quickly raise the learning curve. Some archivers like WinZip and WinRAR feature seamless drag-n-drop archiving onto their program windows, but too many were awkward or just did not bother.

In the end, we fell back on eight shared criteria by which to judge all seventeen archivers in this review by:

1. Nested context menu entries — Does the archiver cascade its options within the context menu?
2. Customizable interface — Can I change the archiver's interface to how I like to work?
3. Drag-n-drop archive creation — Yes or no, some do it very well, and some do not do it all.
4. SFX integration (self-extracting .exe) — Can the archiver create a self-extracting archive?
5. 7z and RAR file creation and extraction — Not one or the other, but can the archiver produce archives both formats and extract them.
6. Batch archive extraction — Can the archiver extract not just one, but multiple archives in one operation?
7. Best archive ratio achieved — 1.00 is the baseline, and all go up from there. If 500M represents 1.00, then 590M would be 1.18, or would produce an archive 18% larger than the baseline.
8. Compression speed — Speeds of our 1.0G test file averaged roughly 12 minutes excluding one outlier, and ranged from 1:35 to 63:15 (minutes:seconds).

Obviously there are many criteria by which one could judge an archiver. Some users focus on drag and drop file creation or archive speed, while others find user interface and working with an Explorer-style interface within the archiver's file manager most important. The following is a feature grid comparing the seventeen archivers reviewed. It's a handy reference to what each archiver can do, but not how well. As the user, you decide which features and formats are more important based on how you work and what you need from an archiver.

ARCHIVE TOOL COMPARISONS

Disclaimer: Note that these are real-world reproducible comparisons on the test system described below compressing a large 1.06G game installation described below. They may not be representative of other system configurations, or different distributions of files.

Each program was benchmarked on the following test machine: 3.4GHz Intel system, with two 400G HDs, 4G of memory running Windows XP-SP2. Each program was tested on a cleanly rebooted machine with no temp files present. The test file we used for our archive was a game installation and in its original state was 1084M (1.06G) in size and contained 1,113 files in 48 folders. More specifically, the test file included 202M of text files and 354M of .wav files among others. I chose such a large archive merely to stress the limits of the 17 archivers reviewed. Of course, on a different system, results will vary. The reason a large game installation was chosen was its variety of different files — photos, movies, sound, text, .exe, .dll, .img, etc. — and it offered a chance to test the limits of each archiver.

We created archives using both the default normal compression level in each program and also its maximum level. These are real-world estimates, not exact tests. Finding the best combination of switches to yield maximum compression can quickly devolve into a labyrinth of choices, but we tried. If the program offered solid archiving, we tested, but do not report it here since not all the archivers supported solid archiving. We presumed all archivers can handle smaller-sized files without problems.

Click for full-size images:

Archiver Feature Comparison Grid

Relative Compression Speeds



Relative Compression Ratios

7-Zip's Help file has one of the best explanations of benchmarking we found.

Compressing speed and rating strongly depend from memory (RAM) latency. Also you can change dictionary size to increase memory usage. If you enable Multi-threading option, 7-Zip will use two threads for compressing. It can speed up compressing speed up to 70-80% on Multi-Processor systems or up to 25% on Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading. Decompression always uses only one thread, so Multi-threading option doesn't affect decompressing speed and rating. Decompression speed and rating strongly depend from integer part of CPU. For example, Intel Pentium 4 has big branch misprediction penalty (which is an effect of long pipeline) and pretty slow multiply and shift operations. So Pentium 4 has pretty low decompression ratings. Total rating is average of the compressing and decompression ratings.

BEST ARCHIVE TOOL: WINRAR

WinRAR

After evaluating over a dozen competing programs, RARLAB's WinRAR wins our award for best overall archive tool, with an unparalleled breadth and depth of high-end features and superior user interface.

WinRAR is a $29 shareware program (as of Fall 2005) by Alexander Roshal of RARLabs which includes a Lifetime license, and its full-featured trial version offers an ample 40-day evaluation. WinRAR provides power where you need it in an archiver — in its core feature set.

WinRAR provides complete support of RAR and ZIP files, unpacks 7z, ACE, ARJ, BZ2, CAB, GZ, ISO, JAR, LZH, TAR, UUE, Z. Among WinRAR features are strong compression, good archiving speed, multi-volume support, encryption, self-extracting modules, and backup facilities.

SCREENSHOTS

On WinRAR's website, you can see a complete set of screenshots. Here are some samples.

THINGS WE LIKE ABOUT WINRAR

The following is a list of features that we think WinRAR does particularly well, listed in no particular order of importance. When evaluating other archivers, note how well they implement these features.

    PROGRAM

• Good design. WinRAR focuses on the meat of archiving, putting all the most-used features at hand, making the program highly efficient. While WinZip and PowerArchiver are similar in many ways, only WinACE equals WinRAR in design excellence.
• Stability. WinRAR's proven RAR format algorithm is stable, secure, mature, reliable, and actively developed.
• Archive speed. Faster than any 7z creation application, WinRAR was the second fastest archiver to WinZip and PKZip (who tied each other).
• Install directly from archive. WinRAR is among a few archivers that will allow you to install programs directly from an archive without extracting the entire file first. Convenient in that it saves the user an extra step.
• Broad cross-platform support. With Windows, DOS, Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, Unix, and Pocket PC versions, WinRAR has virtually every OS base covered.
• Uncomplicated archiving. Whether you drag-n-drop or use WinRAR file manager, all operations are within a keyboard shortcut or mouse-click. The learning curve is quick and even advanced options are relentlessly simplified.
• Actively developed. WinRAR is well-maintained, with very few bugs in each release, saving users from frustrations common to other frequently updated programs.
• Lifetime license. Being shareware, WinRAR offers a generous Lifetime license of all its products and technologies — one registration buys you everything RARLabs offers with WinRAR, forever. That's the most you could ask of a shareware license.

    FORMAT, LANGUAGE SUPPORT

• Broad format support. For now and the future. WinRAR will fully support the 7z format in future versions (after more progress is made with the 7z algorithm), which will sustain WinRAR's value while offering users what they need under one program. With its current RAR and ZIP creation and extraction abilities, it allows users to use one program for two (and a half) of the three most popular formats; current version (3.50x) supports 7z extraction, with 7z creation likely coming in next major version, if not sooner.
• Format conversion. For both RAR and ZIP formats, WinRAR can create, extract, repair, and convert archives, along with 7z extraction and conversion (to either ZIP or RAR). Most archivers offer creation and extraction abilities.
• RAR extraction/reading is free. While WinRAR is shareware and the RAR algorithm is proprietary, UnRAR.exe is a freeware utility which can be used by anyone, and by any other developer, e.g., TUGZip uses this as a plug-in quite effectively. So even if you don't like WinRAR, you can always extract a RAR archive.
• Unicode file name support. Its Chinese Unicode support could improve, but for now, overall Unicode support is strong.
• Broad international language support. Alongside 7-Zip, WinRAR has the most extensive language support (over 45) of any of the archivers in this review. Take WinRAR anywhere and use it.
  
   

    ARCHIVE OPTIONS

• Strong multi-volume (split volume) support. WinRAR scored high marks with the ease at which it splits and joins volumes for any size you want, allowing you to compress and split archives at will. Generally volumes are used to store a large archive on several CDs/DVDs or other removable media, or when uploading to Usenet using a preset split limit size, such as 7M per split. When used with Parity files, splitting and joining files are a snap.
• SFX module. Self-Extracting Executable archive creation is effortless, not requiring an external SFX application. Many archivers offer only SFX conversion. WinRAR offers users the ability to create and display specified text as a software license dialog when starting SFX file for which the user may either accept it and continue extraction or decline and quit. Users can also create an SFX logo for their archives if they wish. Finally, you have the option of running the executable file automatically upon extraction.
• Pause during archive operation. WinRAR allows the user to pause an archive operation (creation or extraction) for whatever reason. Only 7-Zip and WinACE offer the same feature.
• Background archive operation. While archiving or extracting in WinRAR, you can also press the Background button. Background minimizes WinRAR to the system tray and reduces its CPU process priority. It is restored automatically after finishing the current operation or you may click on the small WinRAR icon in the system tray to restore it.
• Solid Archive support. WinRAR has good solid archive support, where multiple files share compression information resulting in better results than if each file was compressed independently. This can further reduce file sizes (7-zip also support solid archive compression).
• Unlimited file size. RAR file creation size is practically unlimited. (Nota bene: so is 7z.)
• Archive mobility on the desktop. Convenient Cut/Copy/Paste, Drag-n-Drop operations from WinRAR to anywhere on the desktop or within the file system.
• Archive search. Need to find a specific file or type of file in an archive, or whether it is even there? WinRAR's archive search will even find hexadecimal strings, ANSI, Unicode, and OEM character tables.
   

    SECURITY

• File repair from corruption or missing files. WinRAR's file recovery abilities are unmatched. Additional redundancy (Parity data) can be built into any RAR archive making it more resistant to corruption by dialing up the size percentage of its recovery record, allowing the archive to recover from more serious damage, often in the case of a missing split archive.
• Archive locking. Prevents changes to archives when shared or stored. Useful when you want to prevent accidental modification.
   

    USER INTERFACE

• Drag and drop support. Excellent drag-n-drop abilities allow you to drag files from WinRAR to other programs or to the desktop or any folder. If you drag an archive to WinRAR, it opens and displays its files, or if you want to add files to an archive open in WinRAR, just drag them there. Same for archive creation — select a group of files or folder/s, and simply drag them to WinRAR to create a new archive.
• Drag-n-Extract. An expedient feature, where you right-click and drag an archive to a folder, and then select one of the extract options.
• Shell integration. WinRAR does not take over your shell like some archivers. Its nested (cascaded) context (right-click) menu is customizable or can be turned off.
• Keyboard shortcuts galore. Abundant keyboard shortcuts throughout, making navigation efficient and putting almost all of WinRAR's features and commands at hand for those who don't reach for the mouse at first impulse. If you're going to use WinRAR in Shell or Explorer (File management) mode, then learn the few navigation keyboard shortcuts included which will make the program's common features more accessible and easier than it appears at first glance.
• Import/Export personal settings. WinRAR's ability to easily import and export one's personal settings and archive profiles makes moving WinRAR to another computer simple and easy. Few archivers in this review offered this crucial feature.
• Great command line support. WinRAR has great command line support for Windows, plus command line-only versions of RAR available for PocketPC, Mac OS X, Linux, and DOS.
   

STILL ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT

• Speed. WinRAR's compression engine could be faster, but is better than most.
• Interface. WinRAR's interface is sometimes confusing to new users. Interface is most frequently cited complaint by users new to WinRAR, but is skinnable (called Themes in WinRAR). WinRAR takes a minimalist approach within its file manager, and perhaps should consider a third option besides the wizard to aid the transition for new users.
• Limited ZIP creation size. While it can extract ZIP files of unlimited size, its ZIP creation size is limited to 2G.
• 7z file creation. Although 7z creation support is planned in its next major version, this could not happen soon enough. Currently WinRAR can extract 7z files of any size.
• Encryption should be strengthened. Encryption is weaker than other archivers, at only AES-128 rather than AES-256.
• No Forum support. No Forum support, but email support for licensed users is free, and the WinRAR Knowledge Base is excellent.
  

While WinRAR receives our award for best overall archive tool, there are other tools worth considering

EXCELLENCE IN FREEWARE AWARD

TUGZip's weaknesses are detailed above, but one thing to watch is TUGZip's future. If nothing else, TUGZip is an ambitious program, seeking to one-up everyone in features. So far it is succeeding. TUGZip also shows forethought by including both 7z and RAR creation and extraction capabilities in its current version. (You must have the file, rar.exe, in your TUGZip/Plugins folder.) If you are trying to decide on a freeware archiver, TUGZip is not perfect, but provides a well-rounded feature set to users needing batch file extraction, strong encryption options, wide format support, and an easy to use interface. Its tabbed New Archive dialog is so well-designed we're surprised other archivers do not copy its layout. Although TUGZip support lists problems with ACE and RAR plugins on occasion, we encountered no problems using either in our extensive tests.

Our primary criticism of TUGZip centers on implementation of its features. Too many bugs are included with each release and we hope its developer, Christian Kendahl, will rectify this pattern in new releases. Flaws aside, it may well be worth your time to get to know TUGZip, since it has established great favor among many users for good reason. For its commitment to excel beyond other freeware archivers, it has earned the DonationCoder.com Award for Excellence in Freeware.

EXCELLENCE IN OPEN SOURCE AWARD

7-Zip is difficult not to like, if not love. Its feature set is incomplete in its present version (4.x), but that same inadequacy contributes to its simplicity, and perhaps in large part to its wild popularity. 7-Zip has a clean, uncluttered interface, from its file manager to its dialogs. This makes the program inviting, and in turn, easy to use.

We list weaknesses and dislikes of 7-Zip below, most of which concentrate on 7-Zip's dearth of features and its unhurried development for which its developer, Igor Pavlov, has been persistently criticized. For those who know Igor, he is one of the nicest guys in all of tech.

If your archive needs are limited and you prefer working with 7z and ZIP formats, you will likely enjoy using 7-Zip as an Open Source archive solution. 7-Zip provides excellent extraction and browsing support for many formats. If nothing else 7-Zip is addictive, and we bet you won't uninstall it once you start using it. Among the seventeen archivers reviewed here, 7-Zip established itself not only as a top-tier program, but the very best Open Source archiver we found. As a result, we are proud to present 7-Zip the DonationCoder.com Award for Excellence in Open Source software.

OTHER ARCHIVERS

We spent most of our time with the following programs. Notwithstanding the variety of formats employed among these archivers, the most striking thing about their performance is not their differences but their similarity: our characterizations of each are colored by a desire to want to like every program we encountered, but disappointment among them eventually became monotonous.

Most of the archivers below share many of the same features, but all shared problematic shortcomings too great to ignore.

Click the thumbnails below for larger pictures:

	SUMMARY Our award for Best Archive Tool goes to RARLab's WinRAR for its overall reliability, quality, and performance. WinRAR's excellent reputation is well deserved. With very few weaknesses (lack of 7z creation being a notable exception) and a great user interface, it's easily our first choice. Already rich in features, WinRAR continues to improve and seems likely to keep abreast of leading changes in archiving for many years to come. WinRAR isn't perfect, and we'd like to see future versions address the lack of 7z file format creation and improve its 128-bit password encryption. When choosing an archive tool, there are several things to look for. For example: How well does it support different formats like ZIP, 7z, gz, and RAR? How comprehensive is the shell integration, i.e., does it provide good drag and drop support and a nested, customizable context menu? Other factors may also be determinative in your choice, such as Unicode support for international file sharing, SFX creation for building setup programs, Command line support for use in scripts, file recovery, encryption, and compression speed. In the end, many users look for two things in an archive tool: simplicity (ease-of-use) and speed, and in both WinRAR does not disappoint. The software review process reveals weaknesses that often go unnoticed with routine or light use. We found that the good archivers easily distinguished themselves from the rest of the archive pack. If you don't need all of WinRAR's features, we recommend either our Freeware Award winner, TUGZip, or our Open Source Award winner, 7-Zip. Both offer substantial features and reliability. One major reason that WinZip and WinRAR have millions of downloads is their ease to use. Both TUGZip and 7-Zip share that necessary quality, and we think their popularity will continue to grow. RARLab has agreed to offer members of DonationCoder.com a 20% discount on purchases of WinRAR, and has generously donated 10 copies of WinRAR for us to give away to our members. ____________________________________________________________________________ This review was written by Zaine Ridling  of The Great Software List

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