Programs for compressing files. Analysis of the most popular

The article tells about what programs are there for compressing files, what are their capabilities, and what are they for?

The beginning of the digital age

In our time, no one is surprised by powerful computers, smartphones and tablets, but even some 15 years ago, home PCs could not afford all, and even simple mobile phones were not as widely distributed as now. Probably, digital technologies, this is the industry that is developing most rapidly. Every year, new developments, standards and opportunities arise. Especially contributes to this Internet, through which now you can do almost everything.

But at the beginning of the general computerization of unlimited high-speed Internet there simply was not, and existing communication channels were characterized by slowness of transmission and unreliable connection. Removable media also could not boast of great capacity and was very expensive. This is what triggered the development of software such as file compression software.

They were used by everyone who wanted to save traffic, speed up the transfer of files or simply put more text or other information on the floppy disk. Later they became popular in various organizations, when they completely switched to electronic document management. So what is a file compression program? In this we will understand.

Archivers

Such software is often called archivers, because, in addition to the compression and size reduction, the files are added to a single directory. But first things first.

As the name suggests, these programs serve to compress files and reduce their size. This is especially useful when you need to fit large or large size information onto a removable or other computer medium and make it take up as little space as possible. Or you can transfer data over the Internet in those conditions when the connection is slow, often interrupted or just very expensive. Of course, in our time the Internet is almost everywhere, but in hard-to-reach places it remains at the level of the beginning of this century, that is, slow and expensive. It is in such cases that programs for compressing files come to the rescue.

Convenience

In addition to reducing the size, similar programs serve for one more purpose, it is the combination of many files into one archive. For example, you need to transfer or place somewhere a hundred files. Even if each has a small size, then sequentially download or write them is not very convenient. Especially when they are all interconnected, and the loss of one or more will make the rest of the work unworkable. In this case, the program for compressing files will create an archive of them, that is, a new "file", which will contain all the rest.

Format

It is also worth noting that you can open the archive only by the archiver that was used for the packaging, or third-party, if it supports common formats of other similar programs. Often they really support each other, because they work on similar algorithms, and usually there is no problem with this. But in any case, the program for file compression is an important part of software in any operating system. There are many of their varieties, but the most popular are the two. We will discuss them in more detail.

7-Zip

The first is 7-Zip, which exists for both Windows and operating systems of the Linux family. It is distributed free of charge and is one of the oldest and most popular. It is constantly updated, and developers add new functionality and improve existing ones. You can download it on the official website. And if you need a program to compress pdf-files, then it is suitable for this purpose very well.

WinRAR

The second of the most popular is WinRAR. It allows you to archive and compress files, split them into several parts. The program has a lot of settings for any tasks. Also with it you can open archives of other programs. However, 7-Zip cope with this task. It is distributed free of charge, if we talk about private, home use. And if there was a need for such a thing as a program for compressing pdf files, then WinRAR copes with this task remarkably.

So we dismantled the most popular archiver programs.