Windows – Create multiple zip files that are not dependent on each other

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I want to compress a folder into multiple zip files of 50MB each but don't want them to be dependent on each other. When I use Winzip and use the split feature it creates one zip file and the others are just continuation to it. So, that means I need all of the files to unzip the folder.

I want to unzip each file separately and I don't care if the files are of varied sizes as long as they are less than 50MB.

Best Answer

WinZip (or any modern compressing software) can't know before compressing what will be the size of compressed data. On top of that, the size of a compressed file would change (by a tiny bit) depending of the nearby files data. So if that's not theoretically impossible, WinZip is not able to do this nor any data compression software I know of, as it would involve compressing the data many times to get the closer matches. Your best hope is to manually select groups of files and compress them to get ~50MB files. And when I write "manually", you may want to try writing a script doing the work for you. But I guess 50MB is not a hard limit, and you could just use the approximation method by hand.

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How to achieve the best, standard ZIP compression

If you want compatibility with the Zip Folders capability built into Windows XP, you're stuck with Deflate compression. I don't think you can even use Deflate64, much less the advanced compression methods (like LZMA, PPMD, WavPack, Bzip2, etc.) available in recent versions of winZip and PowerArchiver. PowerArchiver at least defaults to using the .zipx extension for those files -- I don't think WinZip is doing that yet.

The smallest possible zip file that 7-Zip can create can be done with the following command line:

7za a -mm=Deflate -mfb=258 -mpass=15 -r C:\Path\To\Archive.zip C:\Path\To\Files\*

Of particular note: 7-Zip's wildcard parser is not the same as most others on the system. *.* means all files that have extensions. * means all files.

Creating .zip files this way (and, presumably, using other tools that attempt to make smaller "standard" .zip files) is really, really slow. You would most likely save considerable time and space by using 7-Zip or WinRar to create self extracting archives.

Windows – Split a folder of files into multiple zip files based on size or # of files

7Zip should be able to do this. Here is a detailed tutorial using it.

Use the split to volumes option.

Best Answer

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How to achieve the best, standard ZIP compression

Windows – Split a folder of files into multiple zip files based on size or # of files

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