Zip archives can be encrypted with the original 'ZipCrypto' stream cipher (also known as the PKZIP cipher) or with AES. Both the Zip and 7z archive formats can be encrypted with a user-supplied passphrase. Most importantly, 7-Zip supports archive encryption. Unlike the old Zip archives, modern 7-Zip archives (in 7z format) can be up to 16,000,000 TB in size! Archive Encryption (Zip Format) It supports a wide variety of formats (like 7z, zip, tar, wim, iso, rar, and rpm) and can be run from the command line or as a graphical application. Is there a better alternative? 7-Zip Is Better (and Free)ħ-Zip is a free, open source, cross-platform, very fast, archive file manager. However, these cmdlets do not support encryption, are relatively slow, cannot handle other archive formats, cannot peek at file listings inside of Zip archives without doing extraction, and cannot handle files larger than 2 GB (which is a big problem for archiving log files).įor this article, it's the lack of encryption support which is the real deal-killer. PowerShell 5.0 includes two cmdlets for working with compressed Zip files: Compress-Archive and Expand-Archive.
