It is said they can compress up to one billion gigabytes (also known as an exabyte). RAR files also benefit from being able to compress much larger amounts of data. RAR files are named after the Russian developer who created this format, and it stands for: Roshal ARchive files. RAR files are a proprietary archive format (file prefixes usually look like. RAR files are, in many ways, more secure. Hence, how useful ZIPs are and why most people use them for sending and receiving large files on Mac’s.Ī RAR file, on the other hand, is a little different. Making ZIPs open-source, so that every operating system creator in the world could bake this into file formatting. One of the reasons ZIPs are so easy to create and unzip is they proprietary software was released into the public domain in 1989. ZIP files can be created and decompressed using native macOS systems that have worked this way since the file format was created. Yes, in most cases - unless the files have been corrupted or for some reason the receiving computer can’t decompress them - ZIPs work everywhere, on every device.

And ZIP folders can be uploaded and shared using file-transfer systems and cloud-storage solutions. Some email systems, such as Gmail, limit the file size, so if something is too large they convert the contents into a Google Drive folder. It is one of the most convenient ways to send large files in a single folder, usually through email or messenger platforms.

Wherever you send it, whether someone is using a macOS device or Windows - or other operating system - a ZIP folder can be decompressed and opened. Once you've made a folder, you click on File and scroll down to “Compress “” and that turns whatever folder you’re compressing into a ZIP file. ZIP files: What is the difference?Įveryone knows what a ZIP file is. In this article, we look at how to compress and decompress files on a Mac and the ways you can do that with different formats.

But to help you do it all by yourself, we’ve gathered our best ideas and solutions below.įeatures described in this article refer to the MacPaw site version of CleanMyMac X. So here’s a tip for you: Download CleanMyMac to quickly solve some of the issues mentioned in this article.

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