Webskore

Most of you must have been in the situation when you wanted to share multiple files, or reduce the size of big files and send them to your friends through email, or e-messaging, and most of all you wanted to do this for free.

This guide will show you how to do it with one of the best free, open source, software out there.

For this tutorial we’re using this software called 7zip. It’s a free open source, and friendly user software, with the best compressing ratios I could find.

You can download it here: www.7-zip.org .

After installing it, open it and we’ll see a window like this:

First of all, what I’d recommend is setting up 7-zip as Window’s default compression software. You can do this browsing through Tools, Options, and selecting the System tab. Then click the “Select All” button and the result should resemble this:

After this, you should notice that the icons from the files with the extensions selected in the step above, have changed. This means now 7-zip will open those files.

Now onto compressing and uncompressing files.
To compress and uncompress files, you must start by right clicking the file and a 7-zip menu should appear like this:

Here you can choose between extracting (uncompressing) and archiving (compressing) the file.

Uncompressing

The uncompressing process is preety much self explanatory. You just have to click in either “Extract Here” and it’ll extract to the directory the file currently is, or click in “Extract files…” and choose the directory you want the files extracted to.

Compressing

You can either click on Add to “xxx.7z”, and it’ll automatically compress you files with the default configuration, or you can customize the way you want your archive compressed.
This is the window that should open in case you click on “Add to archive…”:

In this window there are many options, between those many option I’ll explain the most useful ones.

• Archive format:
  This is the way you want your file to be compressed. You have many options like 7-zip, which will be fastest and will get you the best results, most of the times, and other options like Zip and Gzip.
• Compression level:
  This will set the amount of compression you want for your file. Beware though, the higher it is, the slower your computer will get.
• Create SFX archive:
  This option is useful when you need your file to be extractable everywhere, without installing software. It’s useful for portability.
• Password:
  If you want to protect you files from being viewed by people you don’t want, you can set a password to that file.
• Split to volumes, bytes:
  This feature is great, when you want to break your file in smaller parts. Useful, so you don’t need to wait to upload/download a whole 1 GB sized file, but smaller chunks and then joint them.

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