How to unzip a file packed with an archiver program

The program-archivers, which appeared even at that distant time, when the amount of free space on hard disks counted only tens and hundreds of megabytes, existed up to our time, having undergone only evolutionary development. This indicates the demand for information compression technology. In the light of this fact, every computer user should understand very well how to unpack a file, otherwise it will be necessary to use the search for an answer on the Internet, which means the loss of his time.

So, what exactly is an archiver program? As you know, all information on the computer, including files, is digital data, or, more correctly, certain combinations of zeros and ones. Their number and total size of the file are in direct dependence. The obvious conclusion is that there can be two solutions that allow you to optimize information: increase the storage capacity of storage devices and reduce the amount of data occupied. The first way is quite predictable and is now very actively used: the capacity of hard drives and flash drives is increasing every year. The second is realized by archivers. At the work such programs analyze compressed (packed) files for presence of identical combinations of zeroes and units (code areas) and replace the found with conditional marks. As a result of such processing, the reduction of the archive size can reach 80%, and upon extraction all initial data is restored.

Beginners often have a question about how to unpack a file, because you can not directly work with its contents. In fact, nothing complicated in this. There are several ways to unpack a file. The most correct thing is the installation of the program-archiver into the system, with the help of which the archive file was created. With this method, there are no problems with unpacking. The problem is that now it is rather difficult to determine exactly which archiver the data was processed. For example, if you understand how to extract a rar file, everything is clear, since this extension is typical of the Rar program, then with wim or tar, it's not so simple. The next method is based on the fact that most modern archivers are universal and allow you to create and unpack files compressed with alternative software products. If the user does not know how to unpack the file, then you can try to do this by any similar program. For example, if you want to extract a file with the rar extension, you need to install WinRAR (for the Windows system). Run it, go to the desired file, point at it cursor and in the menu from the top click "Extract". We select the place for unpacking by the explorer. Here you can also use some additional features (it's better to leave it by default).

You can avoid problems with unpacking by installing two programs: WinRAR and 7-Zip. Having registered in the system, they will allow you to extract files from most archives.

The third way to unpack is to use the Total Commander shell with the archiver plugins installed. When you move the cursor to the archive, you need to press the combination Ctrl + PgDn (Page Down), press the Ins key to mark the desired files and copy them (F5) to the prepared directory.

If the user wants to get an answer to the question "how to unpack the iso file", then you can again use the Total Commander features. The steps for extraction are similar in this case. In addition, you can open the ISO file in Ultra ISO or Daemon Tools and copy the contents of the archive to the desired directory. In the first case, the technique of Drag - & - Drop is suitable, and in the second case, you need to insert the ISO in the virtual drive and copy the files from there, just like from a regular CD.