Compress and encrypt with 7-zip
For a long, long time, there’s always been a very powerful compression utility alongside WinZip and WinRAR, called 7-Zip. 7-Zip is an open source file archiver that supports a wide variety of formats and algorithms, provides lots of options to tweak, and achieves very high compression ratios.
7-Zip’s primary algorithm is the Lempel-Ziv-Markov Chain Algorithm (LZMA) and the compressed archives it creates get a “.7z” extension. LZMA2 is an improved version of LZMA, that, among other things, allows scalable multi-thre-ading support, and as such 7-Zip happens to be the most multi-threaded compression utility available.
7-Zip also supports other formats like regular ZIP, BZIP, TAR, GZIP, ISO and others. The software lets you create self-extracting archives, provides AES-256 encryption support for 7Z and ZIP archives, and contains a file manager and benchmark tool as well.
You can integrate it with the right-click context menu and quickly add files to archives, or individually customise the container, compression method, dictionary and word size, number of threads, etc.
Unpacking is equally flexible, and right-clicking an associated file will expose a variety of extraction methods. If you’re used to using WinZip or Windows ZIP tool, then the plethora of customisation may seem overwhelming at first, but the learning curve is worth it. WinRAR users shouldn’t have that much of a problem, as the interface is similar.
7-Zip is available for almost all versions of Windows, from Windows 7 all the way back to Windows 98. If I remember correctly, Windows 8 did support 7-Zip, but it isn’t mentioned on the software’s Website.
For UNIX based systems there’s only a command line version (which exists in addition to the GUI version for Windows as well). One of the important performance-sensitive feature that 7-Zip lacks when compared to the likes of WinZip is OpenCL acceleration, but it does a mighty fine job even without it, especially on multi-core CPUs.
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