Question about "Make large ZIP file (over 4GB)" option

[deipotent]

Is the “Make large ZIP file (over 4GB)” option automatically enabled when creating a ZIP archive which will contain more than 65535 files ?

I ask because while PA cannot automatically determine if the resulting ZIP archive will be larger than 4GB, it will know if the archive will contain more than 65535 files since PA counts the number of files before compressing so it can show the progress.

If PA doesn’t already do this, can you add this feature to PA. Do you want me to post another thread in the Wishlist forum ?

[TBGBe]

It is not automatically enabled.

I think the problem is that the main advantage of Zip format is speed.
If the compression is delayed by this automatic check of the number of files before compressing, then maybe the speed advantage of Zip would be lost?

Perhaps, nowadays, PA should have this flag activated by default - and let user Deactivate it when required for “old Zip 2” compatibility.

It is not clear (to me) what happens if you activate this flag and there is less than 4GB /65535 files - is Zip 4.5 format still used? (Assuming that deflate64 has NOT been activated.)

Of course, individually, you can set the options you want to use as default via the compression profile.

[Alfons]

In my opinion, this option is nonsense. There is no need to do some checking ahead, exept for the total size of the single file beeing compressed, and this check has to be done for every file, regardless of whether one is creating a zip64 archive or not.

The relevant portions of zip64 archives are kept in special locations in the Central Directory of a zip archive, and the Central Directory is written to disk when the rest of the archive has been finished, means the total count of files etc. is known at this point.

[davidsplash]

If you create a zip file inthe old format of zip then add more files to it it can reach its limited and there is no way in powerarchiver to convert to zip64 format.
Without extracting the files then re zippingthem in zip64 format.

[spwolf]

This option was first introduced when only selected few applications supported extended ZIP format (4.5) in 2002, which meant that your files created with PowerArchiver most likely will not be readable by someone who does have PowerArchiver or PkZip. Today few other compression utilites support it as well so in one of the future versions, option will be enabled by default.

thanks,

[davidsplash]

that would be a good idea but if you reread your message you just posted it does not make sence.