This is a list of file formats used by
archivers and
compressor
A compressor is a mechanical device that increases the pressure of a gas by reducing its volume. An air compressor is a specific type of gas compressor.
Many compressors can be staged, that is, the gas is compressed several times in steps o ...
s used to create
archive files.
Archive formats by purpose
Archive formats are used for backups, mobility, and
archiving
An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials, in any medium, or the physical facility in which they are located.
Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organ ...
. Many archive formats
compress
compress is a Unix shell compression program based on the LZW compression algorithm. Compared to gzip's fastest setting, compress is slightly slower at compression, slightly faster at decompression, and has a significantly lower compression ...
the data to consume less storage space and result in quicker transfer times as the same data is represented by fewer bytes. Another benefit is that files are combined into one archive file which has less overhead for managing or transferring. There are numerous
compression algorithms
In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compressio ...
available to losslessly compress archived data; some algorithms are designed to work better (smaller archive or faster compression) with particular data types. Archive formats are used by
most operating systems to
package software for easier distribution and installation than binary
executables.
Archiving only
Compression only
Archiving and compression
Data recovery
Comparison
Containers and compression
Software packaging and distribution
Features
See also
*
Archive file
In computing, an archive file stores the content of one or more files, possibly compressed, with associated metadata such as file name, directory structure, error detection and correction information, commentary, compressed data archives, sto ...
*
Comparison of file archivers
The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of file archivers. Please see the individual products' articles for further information. They are neither all-inclusive nor are some entries necessarily up to date. Unless ...
*
Comparison of file systems
The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of file systems.
General information
Metadata
All widely used file systems record a last modified time stamp (also known as "mtime"). It is not included i ...
*
List of file systems
The following lists identify, characterize, and link to more thorough information on file systems.
Many older operating systems support only their one "native" file system, which does not bear any name apart from the name of the operating system i ...
*
Solid compression
In computing, solid compression is a method for data compression of multiple files, wherein all the uncompressed files are concatenated and treated as a single data block. Such an archive is called a solid archive. It is used natively in the 7z a ...
*
zlib
zlib ( or "zeta-lib", ) is a software library used for data compression as well as a data format. zlib was written by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler and is an abstraction of the DEFLATE compression algorithm used in their gzip file compre ...
Notes
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Archive Formats
Lists of file formats
*