Why do you need an archiver? That's because you need to decompress RAR files, one of the most popular compression formats in the world, which your Mac can't open. But there are many apps out there that can deal with RAR files, why sArchiver? Well, that's because sArchiver gives you not only complete RAR support, but other powerful features as well. Let's see what it can do.
After you've installed sArchiver on your Mac, it will ask you to associate sArchiver with all the compression formats it supports. You can hit "Associate Now" or do it later in the Preferences window below. Once associated, sArchiver will decompress these files automatically the next time you double click on them. Supported formats include pretty much all the major ones: zip, rar, 7z, tar, gz, bzip2, LHA and ARJ.
But what if you don't want sArchiver to automatically extract an archive every time you double click on it? The developers of sArchiver thought about that too and they offer an integrated custom context menu as the solution. The custom context menu gives you the ability to choose other action to take when you double click on an archive. The custom context can be enabled in Preferences as well.
Context menu
Create Archive in Your own Style
The greatest thing about sArchiver is that it offers many actions for creating archive. First of all, all the archives sArchiver creates could be SFX (self extracting) archives, which can extract themselves without any applications or utilities. So you don't need to worry about neither formats nor unarchivers when transferring these archives. Secondly, sArchiver allows you to add not only password but also note to the archive you create. And another awesome thing is that the archive you create can be splited to volumes with size by your choice. Cool, right?
First you need to add the files you want to compress into sArchiver. There are two ways to do it. You can either hit "Add" and select files afterwards, or simply drag the files into the Drop Zone. The Drop Zone will show up when you click "Toggle Drop Zone". When you have select target files, hit "Compress". A new window will pop up to ask you to name the archive and choose a place for saving it. After you've done that, you will see the window below, where the actions I mentioned above can be set.
Now you can select the format you want to create, should it be SFX or not, password, archive note and the volumes you want to split to.
Image Preview
Another wonderful feature sArchiver boasts is image preview. sArchiver can preview images from archives without extracting.
Once you open an archive in sArchiver, it will list all the content of the archive in its window. This only means that you can check what's inside the archive. The archive has not been actually extracted yet. Select an image you want to preview, and hit "Expand" on the right bottom. A preview window will slide out. All you need to do next is to Click "Generate preview".
Convert Freely
As I've mentioned in the beginning, sArchiver can deal with nearly all the popular compression formats. Here "Deal with" means extract, create, as well as convert. sArchiver can help convert archives from one type to another with a click. You can easily convert Rar, Zip, 7z, LHA, Arj archives to Rar, 7z, Zip.
Easy Extraction
Of course, sArchiver can extract archives quickly and easily. You can either extract a complete archive, or choose to extract only some files in an archive. All these can be done within a click.
System Backup
So far, all the features we've mentioned are about archive. However, it turns out sArchiver has something more to offer. Except from being your super archiver, sArchiver can also backup your application preferences and documents. What's more, these backups are independent. You don't need sArchiver to use them. This is really a very handy feature especially if you are planning to reinstall your Mac or move to a new one.
Conclusion
After using it, I could say that sArchiver is definitely one of the best archiver for Mac OS X. It boasts many powerful features, and is very easy to use. It can even become a system backup tool. Normally, you can't find all these features in one archiver. Now you have sArchiver, enjoy
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