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What’s a zip file?

When you hear the word "archive" you probably think of some big building where you send your old documentation to be stored away. It helps free up space in your office for you to deal with more current affairs. Well, ZIP files are archives for your computer files.

Say you have a lot of files in your "My Documents" folder. You can "zip" them up into a single archive, and only have one file to deal with, instead of hundreds of little ones. Even better, ZIP archives also offer compression. So if you need to store those documents on a CD for backup, you can make them take up less space if you store them in a compressed ZIP archive.

This all stems from back in the day, when computer storage wasn't as cheap and hard drives were measured in megabytes, not terabytes. Back then we had to back up data onto disk (or tape) and have it sent to an offsite data storage company. How ZIP helped was by offering a compression format for these old files. If you compress a couple of files and store them in a single archive file, they can take up a lot less space. Now, though, you're most likely to see zip files used by people emailing large and/or multiple files, such as digital photographs, since the smaller file sizes that zip files offer makes this a lot easier.

There are other archive file formats, too. Some different file extensions you might see include 7z (7-zip), RAR (RAR archive) and SIT (StuffIT archive - Mac only). All of these technologies work similarly, but each has its own advantages. ZIP archives are just the most popular, because the format has been around since the late '80s.