FreeArc is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

high-performance

file archiver A file archiver is a computer program that combines a number of files together into one archive file, or a series of archive files, for easier transportation or storage. File archivers may employ lossless data compression in their archive formats ...

developed by Bulat Ziganshin. The project is considered

abandonware Abandonware is a product, typically software, ignored by its owner and manufacturer, and for which no official support is available. Within an intellectual rights contextual background, abandonware is a software (or hardware) sub-case of the ...

as no information has been released by developers since 2016 and the official website is down. A "FreeArc Next" version is under development, with version FA 0.11 released in October 2016. The "Next" version supports 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux and includes Zstandard support.

Algorithms

FreeArc uses LZMA,

prediction by partial matching Prediction by partial matching (PPM) is an adaptive statistical data compression technique based on context modeling and prediction. PPM models use a set of previous symbols in the uncompressed symbol stream to predict the next symbol in the strea ...

, TrueAudio, Tornado and GRzip algorithms with automatic switching by file type. Additionally, it uses filters to further improve compression, including REP (finds repetitions at separations up to 1gb), DICT (dictionary replacements for text), DELTA (improves compression of tables in binary data), BCJ (executables preproccesor) and LZP (removes repetitions in text).

Benchmarks

Archive size

In 2010

Tom's Hardware ''Tom's Hardware'' is an online publication owned by Future plc and focused on technology. It was founded in 1996 by Thomas Pabst. It provides articles, news, price comparisons, videos and reviews on computer hardware and high technology. The si ...

benchmarks comparing it to the other popular archivers, FreeArc narrowly outperformed WinZip,

7-Zip 7-Zip is a free and open-source file archiver, a utility used to place groups of files within compressed containers known as "archives". It is developed by Igor Pavlov and was first released in 1999. 7-Zip has its own archive format called 7 ...

, and

WinRAR WinRAR is a trialware file archiver utility for Windows, developed by Eugene Roshal of win.rar GmbH. It can create and view archives in RAR or ZIP file formats, and unpack numerous archive file formats. To enable the user to test the integrity of ...

in its "best compression" mode. In the "default compression" tests, it lost to 7-Zip's LZMA2, but still compressed better than WinRAR and WinZip.

Speed

In the same Tom's Hardware tests, FreeArc was outpaced at default settings by 7zip's LZMA2 default compression, and also by WinRAR, even at its best compression settings. FreeArc's compression at its best settings was slower than both 7zip and WinRAR, but still came ahead of WinZip.

Efficiency

In a metric devised by Werner Bergmans of Maximum Compression Benchmark, FreeArc compression is more efficient than programs for classic formats like .Z ( LZW),

.zip ZIP is an archive file format that supports lossless data compression. A ZIP file may contain one or more files or directories that may have been compressed. The ZIP file format permits a number of compression algorithms, though DEFLATE is th ...

( Deflate), .gz or bzip2. (The scoring formula used in this non-public test, :

\text_X = \text_X \times 2^

multiplies the sum of compression and decompression times by a factor that exponentially grades the ratio of archive sizes achieved by the program under test relative to the best known archive size for that data set.) As of November 2010, FreeArc is the top program in this benchmark, followed by NanoZip, bsc and WinRAR. It works faster than WinRAR and 7zip., golem.de

Features

RAR RAR or Rar may refer to: * Radio acoustic ranging, a non-visual technique for determining a ship's position at sea * "rar", the ISO 639-2 code for the Cook Islands Māori language * RAR (file format), a proprietary compressed archive file format in ...

and

ZIP Zip, Zips or ZIP may refer to: Common uses * ZIP Code, USPS postal code * Zipper or zip, clothing fastener Science and technology Computing * ZIP (file format), a compressed archive file format ** zip, a command-line program from Info-ZIP * Zi ...

it is an archiver, not just a data compressor like

gzip gzip is a file format and a software application used for file compression and decompression. The program was created by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler as a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, and ...

or bzip2. Initially it supported only its own archive format, normally identified by the .arc file name extension, incompatible with others; there is no relationship with other

.arc ARC is a lossless data compression and archival format by System Enhancement Associates (SEA). The file format and the program were both called ARC. The format is known as the subject of controversy in the 1980s, part of important debates over ...

formats. More recently, decompression support for other archive types was added, including zip, rar, and 7z. FreeArc has both a command line interface and a GUI. Other features include: * Solid compression with "smart updates" which avoid recompression when possible *

AES AES may refer to: Businesses and organizations Companies * AES Corporation, an American electricity company * AES Data, former owner of Daisy Systems Holland * AES Eletropaulo, a former Brazilian electricity company * AES Andes, formerly AES Gener ...

/ Blowfish/

Twofish In cryptography, Twofish is a symmetric key block cipher with a block size of 128 bits and key sizes up to 256 bits. It was one of the five finalists of the Advanced Encryption Standard contest, but it was not selected for standardization. Two ...

/ Serpent encryption,Patrick Schmid, Achim Roos, (March 10, 2010)
7-Zip 9.1 Beta And FreeArc 0.60
',

including chaining of encryption algorithms * FAR and Total Commander plug-ins * Ability to create

self-extracting archive A self-extracting archive (SFX or SEA) is a computer executable program which contains compressed data in an archive file combined with machine-executable program instructions to extract this information on a compatible operating system and ...

s and installers * Archive protection and recovery layer using

Reed–Solomon error correction Reed–Solomon codes are a group of error-correcting codes that were introduced by Irving S. Reed and Gustave Solomon in 1960. They have many applications, the most prominent of which include consumer technologies such as MiniDiscs, CDs, DVDs, Bl ...

with user-defined size (for example, recovery over Internet being 0.1%, while default is autosize 1-4%).

Supported platforms

Windows binaries are available from the developer. There is no

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit CPUs and ALUs are those that are based on processor registers, address buses, or data buses of that size. A comp ...

variant of version 0.666, but FA 0.11 supported both 32- and 64-bit systems.

FreeArc Next

In October 2016 the first public release of FreeArc Next was released. It is currently available only as a CLI application for 32 and 64 bit Windows and Linux platforms. New features include: * Full-archive deduplication similar to

ZPAQ ZPAQ is an open source command line archiver for Windows and Linux. It uses a journaling or append-only format which can be rolled back to an earlier state to retrieve older versions of files and directories. It supports fast incremental update ...

* Support for the Zstandard compression algorithm implemented by Facebook *

Lua Lua or LUA may refer to: Science and technology * Lua (programming language) * Latvia University of Agriculture * Last universal ancestor, in evolution Ethnicity and language * Lua people, of Laos * Lawa people, of Thailand sometimes referred t ...

programming for the INI file * Better files prefetching which increases compression speeds

References

External links

* * (abandoned)
Binary files and source code of version 0.67
{{FLOSS Lossless compression algorithms Free data compression software Archive formats Unix archivers and compression-related utilities Cross-platform software Year of introduction missing File archivers