TUGZip: An excellent archiver that can totally replace WinRAR and WinZIP

2009 June 1

tags: Compression/Decompression, File management, Freeware

by freewareelite

Version Tested: 3.5

Description: Most people will have encountered compressed archives in the IT world of today. The most popular compression format is the .zip format that was invented by Phil Katz together with PKZip, a command line archiver. Nowadays Windows XP and Vista have native support for the .zip format so actually no archiver is needed to make zip archives. However, in those days when zip was just invented (around the end of the 1980s) nobody had even heard of something like a gigabyte but technically the zip format can be as large as 4GB, which was humongous already at that time.

However, as time went by, the storage spaces and file sizes became larger and larger and people thought that 4GB was simply not enough. A Russian developer (I don’t remember his name) invented the .rar file format that had a upper limit of around 100GB, so it went instantly popular. However Windows does not support the .rar file format, so we need a archiver to decompress or compress files in rar and other archive formats (7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR formats, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, etc.).

TUGzip does the job beautifully, quickly and simply and is a highly recommended program. It is the only free program out there that can create rar archives (winrar is actually shareware), but you need to download the WinRAR package first and copy rar.exe over to the Tugzip directory. Here are more details about this program

Unzip ZIP, 7-ZIP, A, ACE, ARC, ARJ, BH, BZ2, CAB, CPIO, DEB, GCA, GZ, IMP, JAR, LHA (LZH), LIB, RAR, RPM, SQX, TAR, TGZ, TBZ, TAZ, YZ1 and ZOO archives.
Create 7-ZIP, BH, BZ2, CAB, JAR, LHA (LZH), SQX, TAR, TGZ, YZ1, RAR, ACE (requires plugin) and ZIP archives.
Supports BIN, C2D, IMG, ISO and NRG disc-images.
Support for external plugins.
Windows shell integration, for example drag & drop and shell context menu.
Can multi-extract to either multiple folders or all in one folder
Basic features like: add, extract, delete, rename, run, view, checkout, install, test, comment, SFX, virus-scanning and disk-spanning.
Repair corrupted ZIP and SQX archives.
Can extract multiple archives at once using Multi Extract.
Encrypt archives using 6 different algorithms. Blowfish (128-bit), DES (56-bit), Triple DES (168-bit) and Rijndael (128-bit, 192-bit and 256-bit).
Create self-extracting encrypted archives.
Automatic updates using the “Web Update” function.
Very light, uses only 7 mb of resources even when unzipping an ace archive

THE WISH LIST:

Support for AES encryption, which most people think is the safest
It opens a window for each archive when multi-extracting, which is very annoying. One window is enough actually and 7Zip can do this.
A “zip and email” entry in the context menu. Normally in TUGzip, this has to be done first zipping the files then emailing them via the context menu.

Verdict: I have tried a large handful of free archiving programs, including ALzip, JZip, ZipGenius, 7-zip, IZArc, QuickZip and even FilZip, but I think this is the best of the best, hope you like it.

Download: http://www.tugzip.com/ To download rar.exe, download at http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm. The rar.exe should be installed together with WinRAR, then copy the executable to the TUGzip directory, then uninstall WinRAR.