Some operating systems come with basic support for unzipping files. Windows 7 for instance can unzip zip files without third party tools. Then again, most users will encounter other compression formats such as 7z or rar eventually which means that they do not a third party software to unpack those files on their computer system.

I’d like to share the two programs that I use for the purpose. Wait, two programs? Yes, I’m using two programs to unzip files on my PC.

7-zip

7-zip is a classic unzip software that supports a wide variety of formats. It can pack and unpack formats such as zip, gzip, tar or 7z, and unpack only compression formats such as rar, iso, msi, cab or dmg.

The program integrates into Windows Explorer, so that it becomes possible to quickly unpack compressed files with a right-click on the file. It furthermore comes with a graphical user interface that can be used as well to pack or unpack files in the operating system.

I use 7-Zip to compress files and to unpack single archives on my computer. It’s extensive support of compression formats makes it ideal for those two tasks.

Extract Now

Have you ever downloaded or transferred many compressed files at once? I did, and that’s where I realized that 7-Zip was not the best program for those situations. Say you have a directory full of compressed files, some split into multiple files.

The best tool for this situation is Extract Now which integrates into Windows Explorer as well. Simply right-click the folder containing the compressed files and select Search for archives from the context menu.

Extract Now will locate all archives in the folder. The unzip software can be configured to extract all archives automatically, or after user input only. The program can also be configured to monitor directories to unpack new archives that are stored in the directories automatically.

In short; I use 7-zip to pack and unpack individual files, and Extract Now to mass extract compressed files in a directory.

Which unzip software do you use? Let me know in the comments.

Extract Now was mentioned in the comments. I did write about it earlier actually but forgot completely that it would have that feature. As the name suggests its main purpose is to extract archives and since I do not pack files regularly I decided to make this my main application to handle archives. Extract Now supports many major file types such as zip, rar, 7z, iso and img, all in all 17 file types are supported.

Two ways are provided to communicate with the program. The main interface supports drag and drop which is probably one of the coolest features in an archiver that I have seen for a long time. Just drop a folder into the interface and Extract Now will scan it plus all subfolders for supported file types. The files will then be added and can be extracted automatically.

Several options can be configured that customize the output like retaining the archive folder structure or to extract archives into their own name folder.

Extract Now can also be added to the right-click context menu to extract files this way. This comes in handy if you want to extract just one file and not multiple ones. I have to admit that I’m so impressed by Extract Now that I made the switch from IZarc to it.

I knew that it was possible to mark more than one file and extract it at once using the right-click menu function but I did not know how to handle archives with multiple volumes. The obvious way to handle those files would be to mark them all and extract them but this did not work because only the first volume of an archive has to be selected to unpack it.

My first test brought the correct result though. I marked all the 24 rar files (change that to zip or whatever format you are dealing with) and right-clicked one of them. I then selected Extract Here like I would when extracting single archives and all the 24 rar files where extracted at once.

This is in my opinion a great time saver and will hopefully help at least some users who were facing the same problem.

The feature that sticks out is that it processes subdirectories automatically as well. If you like your downloads ordered, like Anonymoose who mentioned the software, you could have many rar – or other formats such as zip – files in different folders on your hard drive. Just drag the main folder into Extract Now and it will do all the rest automatically for you.

Besides the obvious drag and drop support it also integrates nicely in your Windows Explorer giving you options to extract files by right-clicking them.

I said earlier that the most used formats like zip, rar and gz are supported as well as image formats such as iso and img. You still need a software that is able to zip software which means this tool is basically for those who work a lot with files that they have to extract.

Next to that it can also unpack files from installation packages, it would be no problem for instance to unpack Windows Installer Package files (msi) or unpack the latest Firefox release with the Universal Extractor. It does not make that much sense to use a program like Winrar if you never pack files yourself, a tool that would extract all the archives would be more than enough.

Universal Extractor adds menu entries to the right-click men. You can choose to extract files, extract the archive in the same directory and extract the archive into a sub-directory.