In short, if you need to open archives of any flavor, you can't go wrong installing The Unarchiver. Second, take a gander at Wikipedia's ' List of archive formats.' This handy page explains all of the file extensions used on various platforms for archived and compressed formats. If you're curious and want to know exactly how many different archive formats exist, first look at The Unarchiver Supported formats page. The only time you have to interact with the program is to give it permission to write to a folder, if you want to extract an archive into the same folder in which it lives. When you double-click on the application, all you see is the Preferences window. To install, you only need to download it from the App Store. Also included is support for over 29 languages and DOS and Windows formats. If you find bugs or have a problem, Dag Ågren maintains an old-school support board on which you can ask questions. No problem for The Unarchiver there either. If you use more current formats and various download sites, you may encounter RAR or Tar files. I'm pretty sure that's not right! Must be a backup from a crashed drive. Oh joy! Anyone need an Macintosh FTP list from 1995? (Curiously though, my search for files created before 1999 found over 1000 files created in 1969. sit files from 1994 and The Unarchiver opened them. I dug up some seriously old files to test The Unarchiver. The Unarchiver can decompress many file types, so rejoice, because you can actually open DiskDoubler, Compact Pro and PackIt files now.īy subscribing, you are agreeing to Engadget's Terms and Privacy Policy. If you happen to have saved those files onto a hard drive socked away for safekeeping, today you are hard-pressed to open those files. You never need to open the program, it just works in the background unarchiving stuff.' That's a glowing recommendation, so I put The Unarchiver to my own test.īack in the old days, it was common practice to archive files by compressing them so that they fit on a floppy disk or CD. I use it because the built-in program is very limited in what it can create and open. I haven't found an archive it can't open.

When I was asked to review The Unarchiver 2.7, a free decompression utility from Dag Ågren/WAHa, I thought 'Who needs this program, when Mac OS X opens most common archive formats?' I quickly found out that thousands of people rely on The Unarchiver to do tasks that lie beyond the scope of built-in Archive Utility.app found in OS X.įirst I spoke to a loyal user, Barry Porter, an Apple Consultants Network member from Delray Beach, Fla.

Macos unarchiver