It finally happened, native support in Windows for additional archive formats
such as .rar, .7z, and a bunch of others. The feature was added in a recent build on
the developer channel for the Windows Insider program, which basically lets anyone just sign
up to receive early versions of Windows. And it's expected that the feature will
roll out to everyone in the regular version of Windows around September,
which is when they'll release the annual major feature update for Windows 11.
And actually, Microsoft announced this feature back in May, and a Verge article said that they
were planning on releasing a build that week with the feature, but it took them a month. But hey,
better late than never. The support for these additional archives comes from an open source
project they're using called LibArchive, and this actually supports a whole bunch of formats.
Most notably though are .7z, .rar, and .tar.gz, which are called tar balls. Those are probably
the most common ones people are familiar with. And I created a bunch of various archives of different
formats to test it out, including some of the more obscure ones like .bz2, and it looks like
it supports a variety of extension combinations to some extent, specifically when it comes to
the tar files. Because not only does it support just .bz2, if you also do .tar.bz2 and .tbz2,
which those two are actually the same thing, it supports those as well.
If you're wondering what the .tar is, that basically is a method of
just combining files into one. It doesn't do any kind of compression,
it basically just puts them together and then you compress it afterwards. So .tar.gz, for example,
is you first tar the files together, and then you use the gzip compression method on it.
And it's the same if you see that with other file extensions. Tar does not compress in any way,
it just puts the files together. And I believe you don't have to even tar the files together for
a lot of these, but it's optional. So you could just see an extension that's .gz. I don't believe
you have to do it for a single file, though for some of them it might require you to do that.
Anyway, you'll also notice that the archive icon that is used for zip is also used for
all of these other formats as well. That doesn't change. Now, one notable thing is
even though in the blog post they say that they use the libarchive project, it does
not necessarily support every single thing that libarchive does, based on my testing at least.
So they do have a list of specific examples, and it of course does support those,
and it does say "and more," but I also looked at libarchive and looked at some formats that
it can create and read. Some of these are .pax, .cpio, and .ar archives, and I created those,
but it doesn't look like it recognizes those as archives like it does the other.
And if you're wondering, yes, I did actually truly create those archives properly. I didn't just take
random files and rename it. Another important thing to note is at the moment you can only open
and extract these archives. You can't create them yet. They said they're planning on doing that in
2024. So if you were to right click a file, you only have the option to compress to zip file.
However, in a Verge article, they did show a screenshot where it showed being able to compress
to several other of the archive formats. I'm not really sure where they got that, but presumably
that's what it's going to look like. And based on that, I assume that you're still not going to have
any kind of control over more advanced settings like compression levels, like you can't with zip.
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Now, while it's probably pretty obvious to you the usefulness of being able to extract a bunch of
different archive formats, you might be wondering why it matters to be able to create more of them.
Isn't zip good enough? And in a lot of cases, yeah, zip is fine and it's the most universally
recognized one. So that's probably what you want to do. But if you do want to compress other types
of files, especially if it's a really big one, other formats might do better. For example,
I decided to do some tests on a folder full of a bunch of text files that I have,
which are basically transcripts and outlines of videos I've made.
I have like 800 of these files in here. It totals to about 7.74 megabytes. If you
just compress this with Windows to a zip file, it goes down to 4.68. So a pretty
reasonable reduction. And if you're curious, I also compressed it with the new build just to
see if there was any difference, but as expected, it's exactly the same.
They haven't changed anything with the compression yet. I also compressed the file with WinRAR and it
looks like Windows uses the same compression level as the normal one in WinRAR. So I assume that's
some kind of universal default. It's not exactly the same, but effectively it is. So I'm just
going to assume that Windows is going to use the normal level default for other archives as well.
And also it seems like for any given archive format, going from normal to the best compression
doesn't seem to make a huge difference. A small one, but not really noticeable. For testing the
other archive formats, I used a program called PeaZip, which supports a bunch of them. And when
I tested creating a tar.gz archive, that actually was quite a bit better than both zip and RAR.
It was just 4.19 megabytes. And again, that was at the normal compression like
all these others. And then the 7zip or .7z format was even better still. It seemed to
be the best actually out of all of them at 3.49 megabytes. Whether that would be
the case for every single type of data, I don't know, but that's just for this test.
And again, just out of curiosity, I tried the ultra compression levels for all of these,
and you could see it's not that much of a difference again within a single archive
type. The overall archive format seems to make a much bigger difference. So considering all this,
you might be wondering, are third party archiving software like WinRAR dead?
And I would definitely say no. Obviously, like I mentioned,
you don't really have much control or advanced settings with the Windows option because most
people don't need them. If you are someone who wants more features, then third party
is the way to go. One example is something as simple as the various compression levels.
Although of course, pretty much everyone is going to support that, not just WinRAR, which is paid,
the free ones as well. And there's plenty of other advanced features I'm not going to get
into. One example though of my favorites is a recovery record, which basically lets you
add additional data within the archive so that if any data gets corrupted, you can reconstruct it.
So you can choose how much of that to add to a RAR file, though again, that's not WinRAR exclusive.
PeaZip supports that, though 7-zip does not. But like I talked about in a previous video,
there is something called par2 files, which are error recovery files,
which you can use on any type of file, not just archive files.
You can use them on video files, whatever, which it lets you create
recovery files that you store next to the file. And if it gets damaged in any way,
then you can repair it. So basically the recovery records in the RAR file are just
building that into one. And if you are curious about the different third party softwares,
of course, there's WinRAR, which everyone knows has the unlimited 40 day free trial.
Though I did buy a license and you should too, if you have been using it for a very
long time, you always want to support the software. Another popular one is 7-zip,
although instead of 7-zip, I would actually recommend a fork of 7-zip called NanaZip,
which has a few additional features, but most notably additional security features.
So I would probably go with that. And like I mentioned, it's a fork of 7-zip,
so it's basically the same software just with added stuff on it. And also there's
that PeaZip one, which I'm not really familiar with besides just testing it
out for this video. It seems to support a lot of file formats, might be worth checking out.
So let me know if you think this is as exciting as I do. Hey, this is a tech channel. I'm allowed
to be excited about technical stuff. Thanks again to Munch for sponsoring this video.
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into short form with AI. If you want to keep watching, the next video I'd recommend is that
one I mentioned before talking about how to create recovery files for basically anything.
So this is really good for archiving files and storing them in storage so you can avoid bit rot,
it's called, or corruption over time. You can repair files whenever you need. I'll
put that link right there. So thanks so much for watching and I'll see in the next one.