How can you keep your data safe and in a single place without making too much of a mess? One of the answers is archiving them. If you don’t plan on using them in the near future and you do not want them to take too much space on your computer then compressing them into one of the formats available on the market is a very good idea. Besides, you can protect them and prevent prying eyes from taking a look inside your documents by applying a password on them.

PeaZip is a free, open source file and archive manager for 32 and 64 bit Windows and Linux. It is available either as installable and portable application (not needing installation). Full support: 7Z, 7Z-sfx, ARC/WRC, BZ2/TBZ2, Custom (user defined), GZ/TGZ, PAQ/ZPAQ, PEA, QUAD/BALZ, split, TAR, UPX, ZIP. Open, browse, extract, test: ACE, ARJ, CAB, CHM, COMPOUND (MSI, DOC, XLS, PPT), CPIO, ISO, Java (JAR, EAR, WAR), Linux (DEB, PET/PUP, RPM, SLP), LHA/LZH, LZMA, Mac (DMG/HFS), NSIS, Open Office files, PAK/PK3/PK4, RAR, SMZIP, U3P, UDF, WIM, XAR, XPI, Z/TZ (118 file extension supported).

Operating PeaZip is as easy as dragging files. Drop a ZIP file on the interface and PeaZip goes into decompression mode. Drop a regular file and it opens the archiving screen. Well-labeled buttons and simple functions make both processes quick and painless. Adding files and folders is also quickly accomplished using function buttons and traditional file browse tools.

or a better working with PeaZip the developer integrated the most used functions in Windows shell. Thus you can manipulate an archive without having to open PeaZip itself. The options are to be found in Send to context menu in Windows. The options are many and include archiving to 7z and ZIP, extracting, opening the archive, splitting the file, checking the integrity, etc. Despite the obvious benefits of the context menu integration I wish the menu was dynamic. This way, depending on the selected file only some of the options would make themselves visible.

Regarding the compression, I have to say that I am pretty amazed by both the speed of the operation and the compression rate. 500MB of text were finished in no time, faster then ZIP and 7ZIP. The output result was almost eight times smaller then the original, and took about three minutes to complete with a speed of almost 3MB/second. The result was insignificantly smaller in size then compressing the folder with 7-Zip with the same parameters (about 1MB smaller).