PeaZip 6.0

In the world of archive files, not everything is ZIP or RAR. There is a certain gray area where other archive file formats and compression tools strive to find their place. Among them, PeaZip stands out for a number of reasons: it supports all popular archive formats, it’s an open source development, and it has created its own class of archives – the PEA files – designed not only to compress your valuable data efficiently, but to protect them from unwanted eyes as well.

PeaZip is easy to navigate, intuitive and useful to all kinds of users. Its extensive functionality is nicely organized around a clean and nice-to-look-at interface, where you can find, together with the obvious create, open, and extract routines for the archive formats supported, a file manager, an archive manager and security-related options and features usually absent in many of its competitors. The list of archive file formats that PeaZip can open and extract amounts to over 180, a list that includes all of the most popular formats. Data compression is available for a dozen of those formats, including 7Z, ARC, TAR, ZIP, and – of course – PEA.

PEA is PeaZip’s native archive format, developed with two main goals in mind – a stellar compression ratio and a high-end level of protection that includes not only password protection, but also authenticated encryption (up to AES256, EAX mode) to guarantee privacy, integrity and authenticity.

Some of the many extra functions and features provided deserve highlighting. One of them is the archive conversion feature which allows you to convert archive files without extracting and compressing them again. Another excellent feature is the option to add or remove files to or from an archive without rebuilding it, as well as of edit (individually or in batches) any images in order to improve their size, therefore optimizing the overall compression ratio. You can also find and get rid of duplicate files that may be taking up archive space unnecessarily.

PeaZip can also split and join archives, verify hash and checksum values, scan your archives for viruses, encrypt and decrypt files, create and extract archives with double file extensions and securely shred files and folders, among many other functions. This high level of versatility and utmost care for archive security and data confidentiality are but two of the many reasons that make PeaZip such a renowned and well-respected archiving software solution. The fact that it is an open source tool is yet another plus, a guarantee of constant evolution and innovation.

Francisco Martínez

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