The article talks about what an archiver is, why it is needed, how it works and what types of files it compresses best.
The Beginning of the Digital Age
Once upon a time, people seriously discussed that an ordinary person has no need to have a computer at home. Fortunately, with the development of information technology, the size of computers has significantly decreased, and productivity, on the contrary, has grown, and as a result, the range of tasks that the device can handle has increased. Nowadays, almost everyone has computers or their analogues: tablets and smartphones. The latter, of course, are telephones, but they can also be called handheld computers, since they perform almost the same functions besides calls.
Gradually, the need arose to transfer information from one computer to another, this was helped by floppy disks, laser disks, and then flash drives with memory cards. But this was not always the case, for a long time the only way was to resort to the same floppy disks, but their size is ridiculously small in comparison with modern media. In addition, the number of Internet users was growing, and in those days it was slow and expensive. And in the end, a whole series of programs appeared that could archive files, significantly reducing their size. So what is an archiver?
Definition
An archiver is a program that compresses one or many files and then pack them into an archive. In simpler terms, it can both reduce the size of one song or a text document, or do it with several by creating an archive — one file from a set, which can then be unpacked and the source information obtained before being compressed and compressed. When answering the question of what an archiver is, it is also worth mentioning that there are no ideal compression algorithms , and it is impossible, for example, to compress a 5 GB movie to 1 GB. Rather, it is just the same possible, but its quality will be 5 times worse at the output, respectively.
In addition, not all files lend themselves to normal compression to reduce size. For example, text and binary are most well processed, but video and music change their weight slightly. So now we know what an archiver is.
It is also worth remembering that the compressed and packaged output files are a special digital archive that can only be opened with the exact same program or with third-party ones if their work algorithms are similar. But at present, almost everyone supports each other's formats. For example, a rar-format archiver is able to open files and a number of others: Zip, 7z, Tar, Wim and others.
Where can I download
Most archivers are distributed free of charge or on shareware models. Find them is not difficult on the official websites of developers or third-party. But in the latter case, there is a danger of downloading a file infected with viruses. In addition, some sites practice a peculiar joke - the program for archiving, in turn, is already packaged by the archiver, to open which you need an already installed archiver. The most popular rar format archiver is WinRar.
Mobile OS
With the development of all kinds of portable devices, such as smartphones and tablets, the archivers intended for them or adapted “computer” ones gradually began to appear. The principle of operation is no different from others, all the same data compression and packaging. By the way, when answering the question of what the archiver program is , it is worth mentioning that compression as such is not a mandatory attribute. Sometimes there are situations when many files just need to be combined for convenience into something single, for example, the same archive, and not to mess around when sending each individually.
Set of utilities
Nowadays, although the urgent need to save Internet traffic or hard disk space has disappeared, the archiver is nevertheless an important part of the set of programs and utilities necessary for work. This is due to the fact that many types of software, books and other things are still distributed over the network in compressed archives. This is also done for convenience, so as not to bother or download a dozen small files, but to download everything at once. Therefore, the question is what the archiver in the computer is, the answer is simple - this is an important program for compressing and packing files, which is difficult to do without.
Most Popular
There are a lot of archivers, they are divided both according to the work algorithms and according to the distribution model, but most of them are free when it comes to home use. In the case of a commercial, a license will still need to be acquired. One of the most popular programs is WinRar. What is a WinRar archiver?
This is a very simple and well-known program, its first version was released back in 1995, and since then the software has been developing uninterruptedly, new functions and compression methods are being added.
It gained popularity by its simplicity, intuitive interface and one of the best indicators of the speed-compression ratio. In common people called "wine archiver." There are also versions for all popular mobile OS, Linux, and Mac OS.
ZIP
In operating systems of the Winows family there is also a kind of archiver. You can find it if you click RMB on the file or folder and select "Send ...", then find the option "Compressed ZIP folder". But this function is not very popular, since such an archiver is seriously limited in capabilities. Windows, for example, does not allow you to choose compression methods, breakdown options by topic, etc., but for some functions this built-in software is still suitable. So now we know what this program is and why it is needed.