PowerArchiver 9.2

This award winning software is a shareware alternative to classic compression utilities. It provides support for virtually all popular compression formats. It’s powerful, easy to use, versatile and user-friendly. You can compress and decompress most archives using the same program, so you don't have to download and install many different utilities just to decompress a single archive.

With PowerArchiver, you can compress and decompress ZIP, 7-ZIP, CAB, LHA (LZH), TAR, GZIP, BZIP2, BH, XXE, UUE and yENC archives. You can open and extract RAR, ARJ, ARC, ACE, ZOO archives. This program is fully compatible with Windows, so you can compress, extract and use other functions directly from Windows Explorer.

What some users may miss is that this utility can’t compress in RAR format, but it shouldn’t be a problem because in addition to ZIP, GZIP and other popular formats, now you can compress your files using 7zip format with a high compression ratio. 7zip is an open source format with an open architecture, so it is expected that in the near future PowerArchiver will take advantage of this to contribute and improve this mighty compression format.

PowerArchiver also works great with ZIP archives. It supports unlimited file size and unlimited number of files in ZIP archives, has support for advanced Deflate64 method providing higher compression ratios, IP AES support (both PkZip 5.1 and WZ 9.0 standards supported). Talking about security, PowerArchiver fully supports ZIP AES encryption, 128-bit/192-bit/256-bit, PKZip 5.1 (full), Secure Zip 8.0 and WinZip 9.0 AE-1 and AE-2. And it can encrypt files using Blowfish (128-bit), DES (64-bit), Triple DES (128-bit), AES 128-bit and AES 256-bit.

PowerArchiver has many useful tools to manage your archives. One of this tools is the Convert Tool, with the help of which you can convert files among formats and use the option to convert multiple archives at the same time. There’s also a Repair Tool to repair broken ZIP archives; though it would be better if it could repair archives of all formats.

With Write/Merge Multivolume Tools you can split ZIP files into multivolumes, and also merge multivolumes into a single ZIP - a useful option when you want to back up a really big file or folder, or when you download many small archives and want to merge all of them into a single one.

The Multi-Extract Tool is a time saver, with it you can extract multiple archives at the same time. For example, when you download lyrics of your favorite artist, you realize you have hundreds of small ZIP files. Instead of extracting them one by one, you can extract all of them at the same time. On the other hand, the Batch ZIP Tool does the opposite. Imagine that you are running a lyrics website and want to compress all your lyrics library in separate archives to save bandwidth. Using this tool you can compress all of them into separate compressed files.
Versions are available in Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Slovak, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese and Ukrainian.

PowerArchiver is great software if you really need all its functionality and can pay for it. If you only want to compress some files for personal purposes, you should try a free utility like 7zip, it may be not that complete but it’s free. If you are more serious about compressing files or want to back up your valuable daily work, PowerArchiver will be the best choice.