Unlike many other archive formats, 7z has been nearly universally lauded for its efficient and significant file compression.īut that's not all. How to create, convert, and split 7z archives.How to unzip 7z archives on Mac by default.7z files in the first place? Let’s explore. 7z archives if you encounter them? And why should you use. The code is open source and has been downloaded hundreds of millions of times since. 7z files.ħz is an archive file format created by Igor Pavlov in 1999, primarily to improve upon the compression used in ZIP and RAR. There are lots of archiving solutions available, the most popular ones you might be familiar with are ZIP and RAR. By zipping up files and folders into an archive, we not only reduce their size but also keep the original relationship between the files. The solution to all of this is archiving. Has it ever happened to you when you send a folder in an email and it arrives empty? And if you think about all the photographs and videos we’re storing, we sometimes need to pay for a lot.Īdditionally, we want files to function well when transferred over email and folders to remain intact too. Originally, it was because storage was expensive, and hard drives cost hundreds of dollars for megabytes of space!Įven today, when SSD and cloud storage can measure in terabytes, we’re not so keen on using and paying for more space than we need to. Since the early days of software and computers, people have been trying to reduce the size of their files. Compress and unpack any files on Mac with Archiver.

Archive utility