How to compress archive

Windows comes with a built-in feature of file compression. Compressed files take up less space on the hard disk, in addition, you can transfer them to another computer or to another partition on the hard drive faster than uncompressed files. Also compressed files are more convenient to send by e-mail. In order to compress a file or folder in Windows, you must perform a few simple operations.

Instruction

1. Locate the file or folder you want to compress. Right-click the mouse on a file or folder, point to send to, and select Compressed (zipped) folder.
2. After you run this command in the same directory where the original files or folders will appear compressed (zipped) folder. If you need to add a new file or folder to an existing compressed folder, you can simply drag them into this compressed folder.
3. To extract a single file or folder from the compressed folder, double-click it to open it. Then drag the desired files or folders from a compressed folder to a new location. To retrieve the entire contents of the compressed folder click on the folder, right-click, then select Extract all.
4. The compression ratio (the ratio of the volume occupied by files on the hard disk before archiving to the volume occupied by the archive) depends on the type of files and the used archiver. Best compressed text files, while compressing video or audio files, and images leads to a gain in space requirements, as almost all popular multimedia formats, including JPEG, MP3 or MPEG initially provide for compression of content with a large coefficient.
5. For backups created using the built-in Windows archiver compression ratio usually does not exceed 1.3 and 1.4. Using a third party archiver a WinRar or ALZip) or free (7-Zip, FreeArc) – allows to create archives with a higher compression ratio (up to 3 - 5). The higher the compression ratio, the more time you want the archiver to compress the files and then unzipping them.
6. Archivers allow you to create files with special properties – for example, password protected, or split into parts (volume) not exceeding user-specified size. Also with their help you can create self-extracting archives that have the extension .exe and can be decompressed even on a computer that does not have an appropriate archiver. The creation of such archives with the standard Windows tools is impossible.