PeaZip just recently has been updated to version 3 that introduces several new options and features. Peazip 3 is available as a portable version or an installer for Windows and for Linux as well. The data compression software offers full support for the popular formats 7z, gz, tar and zip and can extract dozens more including rar, gzip or cab.

The program obviously supports the standard operations that all the popular archivers offer. The additional options provided by PeaZip 3 on the other hand make it interesting at least for some uses.

Peazip 3 supports for instance archive encryption with a password or keyfile, secure deletion of files from within the program, advanced filters to include or exclude files, multiple basic and advanced editor support, system tool access like defragmentation, converting a disk to NTFS or cleaning up the disk and add-on support to increase the program’s functionality.

The file compression software has lots of options that make it interesting. Users who want to download PeaZip can do so at the project’s homepage at Sourceforge.

Once integrated users can right-click files and unpack them and create files as well using the main program interface. The user can choose between three options on how the progress is displayed for him. Two are graphical representations while one uses the command line. File checks can be performed as well displaying checksums / hash information of various algorithms which is great for verification purposes.

Peazip does have one problem though which makes it unusable for me. Peazip extracts selected archives at once. This means that if I select two archives they are unpacked at the same time which in turn means that the unpacking processes takes longer than in tools that unpack files after each other.

A quick benchmark with two rar archives had the result that PeaZip needed about twice as much time as IZarc to unpack those archives. Peazip was a little bit faster though when only one rar archive was unpacked.