I hate paying for every little piece of utility software I need because it adds up so fast.  The search for a free zip utility that can handle archiving Virtual Machines is over ...

I looked at 7Zip and IZArc for general zip utility functionality as well as for archiving Virtual Machines.  Virtual Machines have very large disk files and can present difficulties for zip utilities that are not well written.  So far IZArc has handled Virtual Machine images up to 4.6 GB with ease - which, by the way, it reduced to a 2.2 GB zip file on "normal" compression. 

It works well as a general Zip utility and has good shell integration.  It includes a "checkout" feature, archive testing and repair and a split function for splitting a large archive into files to be burned to media.  Performance is respectable and on a Core Duo machine I can easily do other tasks while zipping operations are happening.  It has a built-in self extractor utility that allows a confirmation message to pop up - this is handy for putting "you are responsible for licensing" messages on Virtual Machine archives in case they ever get shared outside of the context of the licenses for any software that they contain.

The number of types of archives that it handles is downright dizzying and includes all unix zip formats.  It can even open non-ISO CD image files and convert them to ISO files.  You can also install the command line utility which allows command line operation and automation of zip activities.  Occasionally when I've made a mistake I've needed to kill IZArc so I wouldn't have to wait for a long zip operation to complete - it has always been well behaved when I do this in that I can restart it and there are not ongoing problems or issues due to killing a previous instance.

As a side note I found 7Zip less responsive, handled less archives and it hung more frequently than IZArc.

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Topic: Engineers Toolbox, Virtual Machines