Ahh…I am here yet again to introduce to you another open source software. For this time around, it’s  a archiving program. Basically what an archiving program does is to compression or combine different files into one smaller file like our good old Winzip software. I am sure everyone knows what that software does. And it’s name is PeaZip. Why is it called PeaZip? Well, I have no idea. Perhaps it is because it is small in size like a pea? However from the Windows version of the installer, it is about 3.3MB, so it isn’t exactly small in size.

Anyways, this is an open source software and that means it is available freely with source code. And features wise, it is very impressive. It supports a wide range of archiving formats like zip, gz, arc and many more. Moreover, it can open iso, rar and even ace files. You will need to get a plugin to open ace files though. It seems to support nearly every file format which I myself know about, so you should be fairly safe to use this software to access your archives, no matter what format they are in. PeaZip also has some very good security options. It supports various encryption protocols like AES256, blowfish, Twofish256 and Serpent256 encryption. It also protects some archives against corruption by employing “recovery records”.

You can also make use of PeaZip to create, edit and restore the archive’s layout. This helps in speeding up archiving or with backup operations. PeaZip can also handle multiple archives at once. This will make accessing multiple files a breeze for the user.

PeaZip works under both Windows and Linux.