Archiver programs that appeared back in the distant time, when the amount of free space on hard disks were estimated at only tens and hundreds of megabytes, existed until our time, having undergone only evolutionary development. This indicates the demand for information compression technology. In light of this fact, every computer user must understand very well how to unzip a file, otherwise you will have to use the search for an answer on the Internet, which means losing your time.
So what exactly are archivers? As you know, all the information on a computer, including files, is digital data, or, more correctly, certain combinations of zeros and ones. Their number and the final file size are directly dependent. The obvious conclusion suggests itself, according to which there may be two solutions that can optimize information: increase the capacity of storage devices and reduce the amount of data occupied by data. The first way is quite predictable and is currently very actively used: the capacity of hard drives and flash drives is becoming more and more every year. The second is implemented by archivers. During their work, such programs analyze compressible (packaged) files for the presence of identical combinations of zeros and ones (code sections) and replace the found with conditional labels. As a result of such processing, the reduction in archive size can reach 80%, and upon extraction, all the original data is restored.
Beginners often have a question about how to unzip a file, because you cannot directly work with its contents. In fact, there is nothing complicated about this. There are several ways to unzip a file. The most correct one is installing the archiver program into the system, with the help of which the archive file was created. With this method, there are no problems with unpacking. The problem is that it is now quite difficult to determine which archiver processed the data. For example, if you understand how to unzip the rar file, since this extension is typical for the Rar program, then with wim or tar, not everything is so simple. The next method is based on the fact that most modern archivers are universal and allow you to create and unzip files compressed with alternative software products. If the user does not know how to unzip the file, then you can try to do this with any similar program. For example, if you want to unzip a file with the rar extension, then you need to install WinRAR (for the Windows system). Having started it, we follow to the necessary file, we hover over it and in the menu above click “Extract”. We select the place for unpacking by the conductor. Here you can use some additional features (it is better to leave it by default).
Unpacking problems can be avoided by installing two programs: WinRAR and 7-Zip. Having registered in the system, they will allow you to extract files from most archives.
The third way to unpack is to use the Total Commander shell with installed archiver plugins. After moving the cursor to the archive, you need to press the combination Ctrl + PgDn (Page Down), use the Ins key to select the desired files and copy them (F5) to the prepared directory.
If the user wants to get an answer to the question “how to unzip the iso file”, then you can again use the capabilities of Total Commander. The extraction steps are similar in this case. In addition, you can open the ISO file in Ultra ISO or Daemon Tools and copy the contents of the archive to the desired directory. In the first case, the Drag - & - Drop technique is suitable, and in the second, you will have to insert the ISO into the virtual drive and copy files from there, just like from a regular CD-ROM.