Put The Squeeze On Your Mac’s Files With BetterZip.

Remember the days of small hard drives and a large number of files? Remember Stuffit, the utility we used to compress Mac files to save space or to send files to others?

Those days are almost, but not quite, gone. It’s time for a better zip for OS X. Improving on something good is always a challenge. What’s better than Apple’s Archive, which zips files?

What? You didn’t know your Mac can zip up files? Sure. Click on a file in Finder. Right click. Select Compress. That’s Apple’s Archive utility. It zips files and makes them smaller so they can be sent or saved.

Who cares about small files these days? Hard drives are so big there’s no need to throw anything away, right? Not so fast.

If you have 10 photos, or 56 files you need to send to someone, that’s what Archive does. Select all the files and then select Compress, and all the files show up together in one archived file. Send it and your recipient can unzip it and get all the files.

Is there a way to make it better? Yes. Macitbetter, the makers of BetterZip added a few outstanding features to the tried and true zip format, which creates those handy archives.

BetterZip opens and extracts files in more formats, including some I can only spell but have no idea why they exist--IP, SIT, TAR, GZip, BZip2, RAR, 7-Zip, CPIO, ARJ, LZH/LHA, JAR, WAR, CAB, ISO, CHM, RPM, DEB, NSIS, BIN, HQX, DD.

See? Do you know all those compression formats?

BetterZip lets you pull files out of the zipped archive without unzipping it. That saves time as you don’t have to worry about managing files you don’t need.

Creating an archive is actually easier in BetterZip. Instead of making copies of what you want, simple create archive file and drag and drop your files. BetterZip saves files in ZIP, TAR GZip, BZip2 compressed TAR, 7-ZIP, and RAR. Whew.

Sending files that are valuable requires security features. BetterZip protects your files with a password, and a WinZip compatable AES-256 encrypted archive. It’s also easy to use BetterZip to update existing archives which already have files inside. Treat the BetterZip archive as if it were a folder, so moving files and folders around inside is a breeze.

The Mac has lots of extra baggage stuck to files that may not make them fully compatible when sent to Windows or LInux users. BetterZip can strip out the baggage, like resource forks, before you send them.

If you like OS X’s Archive zip compression, and you should, but find yourself needing more, then BetterZip might be the better way. There’s probably a dozen archive utilities that compress and store files for Mac users. I like BetterZip, well, better.

Do you use the Archive feature in OS X? Is it to save space or to send multiple files to other users? Talk Back in the Comments section below.

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Off Topic #23 - Mac OS X Leopard is now at version 10.5.2 which we’re proclaiming the best yet, though we expect version 10.5.3 soon. If you haven’t upgraded yet, don’t forget that Leopard is on sale at the Mac360 Store, and so are the latest Leopard books. If you plan to order Leopard or a Leopard tips book from Amazon, please consider using the Mac360 Store to place your order (it’s really Amazon). Click Here to look at the latest Leopard books.

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