Recommend me a good archiver (Windows or multi-platform) please.

[Dat Guy]

Today I have a question and I could need your advice.

 

When I started with desktop computing (on Windows, of course), WinZip was the standard for archiving files which became increasingly more popular since file sizes grew faster than hard disks. Good old times. Somewhen around the release of WinZip 7.0 I started playing with various other options, including the obvious WinRAR, WinAce, Squeez and the then-freeware PowerArchiver. When PowerArchiver became shareware, I had to look around yet again and finally settled with the still young 7-zip archiver which is what I have been using until today. Being a software developer and a random file sharer (only licensed contents, I promise), I need to handle file archives rather often.

 

Up to now, I was fine with the .7z format because most Windows archivers can handle these files as of today. When I started using it, .zip compression was mediocre at best. However, after a couple of long(ish) discussions about this subject, I was notified that 7-zip might not be the best option anymore: The .7z format is still not really popular outside the Windows world, WinRAR has a better RAR format and supports archive repairing, Bandizip has "intelligent compression" which could save me some time when packing my software releases, and even PeaZip is still around, supporting e.g. PAQ.

 

So I thought I could ask you which archiver you would choose if you were me. Would you stick to 7-zip or would you switch to something else, and why? (I guess "why" is indeed the most interesting part here.) Should I switch to .zip for portability reasons or is there a better portable archive format available? Here's what I need:

• Needs to run on Windows, other systems are optional (but they should support opening the created archives).
• Does not have to be freeware.
• Must provide the option to work via command-line options (for scripted releases).
• Should be able to open .7z files (at least for reading).
• Should seem to have a future, not die out too soon (like TUGZip and WinAce did).
• Should be able to compress with a good ratio (storing uncompressed files wouldn't make sense for most of my use cases).
• Nice to have: "Intelligent" compression (e.g. skip JPEG files).

Thank you in advance.

[Electronics Wizardy]

use 7zip, you can also make zip and tar.gz archives w ith it aswell

[kirashi]

Use either 7-zip with 7z or tar.gz compression or PeaZip with their PAQ8* compression.

7-zip provides the best compression for performance/time ratio using default settings, although WinRAR is close behind.

PAQ8* compression is absolutely BAT SHIT AMAZING in certain use-cases, but requires a long time and oodles of RAM.

(I've used it to compress a 4.5GB MaNGOS database to ~700MB; that said, the database was all text so...)

 

The following table is a sample from the Large Text Compression Benchmark by Matt Mahoney that consists of a file consisting of 10⁹ bytes (1 GB, or 0.931 GiB) of Wikipedia English text.

Program	Compressed size (bytes)	% of original size	Compression time (s)	Memory (MiB)
PAQ8HP8	133,423,109	13.34	64 639	1849
PPMd	183,976,014	18.4	880	256
bzip2	254,007,875	25.4	379	8
InfoZIP	322,649,703	32.26	104	0.1

[Dat Guy]

7-zip doesn't support PAQ8 and I don't know if other applications do...?