How to archive a file and reduce its size

How often do our guesses and expectations break about the realities of life! Could someone have thought that, first appeared in the distant 90's, the archivers will survive to this day. And they will not just survive, but they will continue to develop and constantly improve. The most famous of them is the archiver win rar. There are also such quite popular ones as 7-Zip, WinZip.

The archiver is a special program designed to reduce the amount (compression) of data. The reason for the appearance of such programs was the lack at that time of capacious hard drives and convenient portable media. The capacity of floppy disks barely reached 2.88 MB, and each megabyte of disk space cost quite a palpable amount. Reducing the amount of data occupied, it was possible to partially solve these problems. At the moment, when a 2 terabyte hard drive is not inaccessible to anyone, archivers are used for more convenient storage and transfer of packed data, and not because of the need.

The archiver, processing the information specified to it, uses the newest algorithms, allowing to reduce its volume by 81% (Excel file), which seems to be a pretty impressive result. Of course, the compression rate depends on the type of files being processed. For example, image files * jpg or music * mp3 almost do not shrink, since their formats themselves assume a reduction in volume when creating.

Users often ask how to archive a file and what advantages it will give on a modern computer. Advantages include:

- direct compression of data. It may be useful, if necessary, to attach an attachment file to the e-mail, while decreasing its volume, and hence the traffic. Even now, many people have to use a relatively slow connection to the Internet with a n-gigabyte billing (this connection via GPRS, EDGE, 3G);

- Sometimes email programs block receiving executable files (* com and * exe). In this case, one of the ways to work around this limitation is the ability to package the file with an archiver;

- Almost all compression programs allow you to set a password for the created archive. For example, the winrar archive "hack" is almost impossible, especially created by new versions of the program. For added security of information - it's just a find;

- the ability to split the archive into volumes (parts of one archive) of the selected size. A very useful feature, for example, if you need to write a large amount of information on CDs. Direct recording means the use of additional media, and for data in compressed form they are required less. After copying the archives to the hard disk, you can easily restore the entire volume later. In addition, the breakdown to volumes allows you to write a file larger than 4 GB on a medium with FAT32 system.

So, how do I archive a file? Each archiver, designed to work in the Windows system, has a convenient graphical interface. Run it, you can adjust the compression settings, select a password and other options. After specifying the prepared folder or file, click "Add to archive".

To understand how to archive a file, any user of the computer can. After all, the properly installed archiver creates a link to itself in the system menu (clicking the file with the right mouse button, you can see the compression options in the appeared menu).

Finally, the third way that answers the question of how to archive a file is by using the command line. All compression programs support this feature. Beginners use this method rarely, but experienced users help to more flexibly configure the creation of the archive.

There is nothing complicated in the archiving of files . The best way to learn is to select an arbitrary file (just in case you saved its copy) and try to reduce its size by the program-archiver.