Talk:List of archive formats

Purpose (Statement of Intent)

This article has no defined purpose or statement of intent. It is also in duplication/competition with the article Comparison of archive formats. Request discussion on the purpose and intent of this aub-article to differentiate it from other sub-articles.

Merge. These two articles are highly redundant. The "list" contains a great deal of comparison. - Frankie1969 (talk) 14:14, 17 September 2011 (UTC)

.pkg rename to Package

I think that the .pkg's official package format should be called Installation Package or Package as per this developer article. - JustinWick 18:10, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Missing packages

• .cab
• Python .egg
• Ruby .gem
• WinAce .xef (compressed file that has been encrypted)
• Ghost_(software) .gho

(cleaned up by Jokes Free4Me 15:59, 27 January 2007 (UTC))

Derivative archive formats

Derivative archive formats such as JAR (which is ZIP), XPI (Mozilla Installers are also ZIP), EAR and other such extensions which aren't specifically formats, but have a archive format. My reasoning is that you would possible visit this page in order to identify a file and this would help users to identify their JAR as a ZIP file and ths enabling them to figure out how to decompress it.

Do we really need it? Can't they go to wotsit.org or even Google? I am not against the idea, as I have just been thinking about mentioning formats found in common games, such as WAD (Doom, ROTT), PAK (Quake, Quake2) and PK3 (games using the Quake3 engine, such as ET and RTCW). PK3 is a ZIP. -Jen 17:06, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Does anyone know about the '.mrs' archive?

I've been updating the CDisplay_RAR_Archived_Comic_Book_File page which uses .cbr (renamed RAR file) and .cbz (renamed ZIP file) to store digital comic books. Should they be included too? Laura Seabrook 11:16 29 August 2006 [GMT+10]

I added references to both EAR files and WAR files, then came here and saw this discussion. Probably easier to ask forgiveness than permission, so if anyone objects the information can easily be reverted.Sheriffjt (talk) 18:22, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

Compressed tarballs

How do .tar.gz/.tgz, .tar.bz2/.tbz2 and .tar.Z qualify as file formats? A .tgz e.g. is a gzip-compressed tar-archive after all. So how is it any different to a normal .gz? .tar is already mentioned as an archiving format. --elias.hc 18:15, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

DMG not package format?

Aren't .dmg files more packages than pure archive formats? So it should be moved to the package section, shouldn't it? Theshibboleth 03:46, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

uif advertisement?

The "Description" entry for UIF in the "Archiving and Compression" section sounds a little like advertising to me. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.37.176.41 (talk • contribs)

Agree. I just tagged the main article, feel free to touch up the section as you see fit. — RevRagnarok ^{Talk Contrib} 03:47, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

lzs

Need some infoon this. Rich Farmbrough, 08:45 6 February 2007 (GMT).

Missing compression format UC2

What about Ultra Compressor 2 and it's .uc2 files? http://www.xs4all.nl/~aipnl/ http://www.really-fine.com/File_Type_U.html http://compression.ca/act/act-index.html

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.174.42.166 (talk • contribs)

What about it? — RevRagnarok ^{Talk Contrib} 12:41, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Free software RAR decompression

Does unrar-GPL come under the RAR 2.0 and earlier only category? --Tene 09:28, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

No free decompression software for .rar? This is untrue. I use UnRarX and it's completely free. It's also listed on Apple's page as freeware: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_source/unrarx.html

pogo (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 21:16, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

There is a difference between freeware and free software; Look it up. The UnRAR code is distributed withouth charge, but under a non-free license. By the way, the same applies to the UnACE DLL many programs use to open ACE archives: it is distributed withouth charge, but not under a free license. I think both should be changed from "Yes" to the "nonfree" template.MCBastos (talk) 15:31, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Package Formats Deletion

First off, why are pacakges even listed? They are neither a compression nor archive format. The fact that they are as "Same as a ZIP file with a madatory blah blah blah" indicates this. Package format listings belong on a separate page which should reference the archive and compression schemes used.

While you can make an argument that package formats are an archive format at heart, it's harder to justify putting Data Recovery formats on this page. 209.139.192.243 17:50, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

JZip article nominated for deletion

Please help discuss that on its AfD page. --AVRS 16:30, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

ECC & recovery data

This list should include a column for whether or not the file format has error correction codes and recovery data built in. For example, rar files have this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.87.231.176 (talk) 19:49, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

Irrelevant graph

I don't see how the graph we have on the page is in any way relevant to the content of the article. The graph was added in this commit and basically only compares the compression time of 3 archivers of a sequence of zeros from 0 to 256 bytes long!

I vote to remove the graph. It may be a good exercise in the art of Bash scripting but it's just that. The information value is zero (no pun intended).

174.6.87.98 (talk) 18:48, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

The graph is useless without indicating units. Delete. --DMZ (talk) 14:52, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Encryption capability

I recommend adding a column to show whether the format supports encryption. The table as it stands now is missing formats such as TrueCrypt, freeware that enables you to pack huge folders away into a single encrypted archive file. You can edit within the archive, then simply dismount and drag&drop to make a backup of the archive. This method has become the bedrock of my file management. I would expect that many others use it this way as well (file management system that happens to be encrypted, rather than just plain encryption software).--Vybr8 (talk) 22:04, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Dubious Sites

The entry for WinHKI leads to a site that offers e-mail scanning bots for mass mailing… The text on the page reads: Mass Mailer - This email and mail scanner bot is for your mass and bulk marketing. This information grabber for online is easy to use. Use one of the best online webtools. Scan the web with this robot crawler. LCS (talk) 00:49, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

idk you but this is interesting 190.60.93.218 (talk) 15:59, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

need to add list

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_book_archive — Preceding unsigned comment added by 115.64.47.34 (talk) 18:08, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

needs a "not completed and may never be" 'warning' or header

A lot of lists of things articles have a heading at the top that say the list is not complete any may never be. This list needs one of those headings. I can think of at least two formats (including ARC_(file_format), multiple types) that are not included. 41.204.74.69 (talk) 07:09, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

B1

B1 was removed because it was added by a blocked user. But it's still an archive format (see http://dev.b1.org/standard/archive-format.html), so should we reinstate it?  Stepho  talk  01:00, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Is it a notable format? All you did is provide a link to the company's own website. Thanks. Logical Cowboy (talk) 01:06, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

I have no idea how much it is used in the real world. I do see that it is a real format supported by a real product but have little more information than that.  Stepho  talk  05:12, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

OK, my gut feeling is that I would move to delete any mention of B1 without some independent sign it is notable other than the company itself that tried to pay a blocked editor to advertise its product on WP. Logical Cowboy (talk) 05:23, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

obsolete

I see that an old mac format is obsolete. That is not helpful. Most formats here are obsolete. I consult this page for clues how to unpack legacy stuff that I have lying around.80.100.243.19 (talk) 16:44, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Mozilla MAFF and MAR

I was going to edit section: "Archiving only"

/* Archiving only */ hyperlink to article: "Mozilla Archive Format"

... by hyperlinking to WikiPedia's "Mozilla Archive Format" article (which is about "The Mozilla Archive Format (MAFF)")

But I realise that there may be two different technologies (file formats) here: ".maff" and ".mar" Can anyone help clarify this?

"The MAFF specification"

MAR file extension/suffix says : "The MAR file extension is associated with applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey etc. developed by Mozilla Corp. The .mar file contains archive with compressed binary diffs in bzip2 compression format." — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fleetwoodta (talk • contribs) 16:49, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

Explain what archiving and compression mean

What does each of these terms mean? Please explain in the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.182.1.26 (talk) 19:51, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Short answer is that an archiver bundles many files into a single file and a compressor makes a single file smaller. They are often combined into a single program to make many files into a single, smaller file. The article already links to file archiver and data compression in the very first sentence, so the article does not need to explain these again.  Stepho  talk  23:05, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

New column: compression rate

I think it would be very beneficial having another column in the archive types table that indicates (perhaps in percent?) the compression capability of each archiver in the list. Shimmy (talk) 00:20, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

The compression rate is too variable. Text tends to be very comrpessible in most format but some formats are optimised for it and hence do even better on text files but poorly on other files. JPEG files are already highly compressed, so an archive full of JPEG files will see practically no compression at all, even though it might do wonderful with text files.  Stepho  talk  03:00, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

.iso "archive format"

It's weird to see .iso described as, "An archive format originally used mainly for archiving and distribution ...".

It's just a disk image. The extension was used with block images created from CD-ROMs, which usually had an ISO-9660 filesystem on them. Some CD-ROMs for Apple computers used an HFS filesystem, but when extracted they'd still be called ".iso", because that's what everyone understood to mean a straight block image.

"The resulting archive is typically optimized for convenient rendering to (re-)writable CD or DVD media." Well, yes, in that you can just copy the contents block-by-block. There's no optimization involved, typically or otherwise; it's just a natural consequence of extracting the blocks in a linear fashion.

I think having an entry for ".iso" is reasonable given how common the phrase "ISO image" became, but I dislike the misrepresentation as a specific archive format. ".iso" tells you nothing about the contents of the file (i.e. is it ISO-9660, HFS, or one big custom database), only that it's intended to be written to a block-oriented device.

Fadden0 (talk) 20:56, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

.ice format "Can be restored with Free Software"

I'd like to see a source for this claim. Last time I used Iceows must have been at least 15 years ago, and nothing appeared since then that could handle .ice for decompression. Ngzero (talk) 10:13, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Table needs column "indexed" (yes/no values)

This would indicate whether the whole archive has to be crossed until a file is found (not indexed: tar, cpio) or whether it's possible to extract a file directly (indexed: zip, 7z). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.209.119.197 (talk) 21:26, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

It is somewhat more complicated than that. While zip has an index, it doesn't store items in the index in any order. So you still have to stream through the entire index, which if there are a lot of small files, can be almost as bad a ones with no index. Dacium (talk) 12:47, 6 March 2023 (UTC)