Oh, ok. Well that still does seem to be unnecessarily long. I think it would have been more ideal to go with LZMA2 Quick or Normal depending on the file type.

Gizmo's Freeware is a pretty good site for some applications.

Winrar just uses the same libraries as 7zip, so 7zip's performance will be 1:1 with Winrar.

The same goes for just about every compression tool. They're all just frontends to the various compression libraries. It's just that some, like Winrar, abuse the LGPL to try and make money out of you.

Don't get what you're trying to say. RAR and 7Z are different formats, and the applications, WinRAR and 7Zip use different algorithms, so how can they be 1:1, or even use the same libraries?

Further, 7Zip cannot create RAR, and WinRAR cannot create 7Z.

For the formats that are common between them, I assume, zip for example (which is the only format both mentioned applications can create, though they can both open a host of others).

Do you mean those 7-zip archives were probably corrupted upon creation, or just that extraction of some 7-zip archive may fail some time, but work when you try to extract it again?

Is this some known problem with 7-zip? Naturally reliability is the #1 priority with a compression program, I definitely do not want to create archives with a broken algorithm even if it creates corrupted archives "only" e.g. 1% of the time.

To me WinRAR has always seemed quite dependable, and I'm hoping the same from e.g. 7-zip.

Never had a problem with archives created using 7zip (ranging from few MBs, to 35GBs files), though I've had a somewhat similar problem. Sometimes with downloaded zip or 7zip archives (which are most likely created using something else other than 7zip (one of the reasons why development of the application is so slow, bugs to be killed before release (that, and the dev team being just one guy, afaik)).

Was unable to extract a single file out of them, had to extract the whole archive.

On the other hand, had similar problems with WinRAR, saying that the archive is corrupted, but the extraction worked with 7zip... go figure.

Btw, the archives I had trouble with were either zip ones or 7zip ones, don't remember the exact format.

I definitely remember sometimes having problems extracting rar files. I think the reason was simply that my version of WinRAR was not up to date, and the rar archive was made with a newer version.

I don't know where the isssue lies but I've never read anyone else having it and it's very, very seldom. I use both WinRAR and 7-zip because some files are rar and some are 7-zip.

I wouldn't hesitate to recommend 7-zip, the only reason I actually came in this thread was because Elenarie's statement about using Ultra compression and I've never seen a good ratio when running something like that.

If you're worried about corruption you could do some testing. For example, take a couple of different file types and copy them to different sizes like a few kbs, megs and then gigs. Then move these files to other computers or the device/hard drive you plan on keeping them then move back and extract them. If no issues arise during this process I think you're good to go.
That looks interesting. Does it support 7-zip because 7-zip is open source as well so their format shouldn't be closed or something like that?

Yes, it does everything. The only thing it doesn't do 'out of the box' is extract ACE files because it is closed source and thus cannot be distributed as an open source program. However, the plugin can be downloaded from the 'addons' page on the PeaZip.org site. Although, I don't bother with that because I haven't encountered an ACE file since the 1990s!

That's not actually true. I assume that you're talking about their .zip and .gz support - well, most compression tools use zlib for those but 7-Zip has its own implementation. You'll most likely find that zip encoding with 7-Zip is slightly slower that with zlib, but with better compression.

7-zip by default creates solid archives (can't recall exactly how it calls them) which basically treats the files as one continuous stream of data instead of seperate streams. It will usually offer better compression rate, but it does mean you have to decompress the stream until you reach that part of it you want. WinRAR also has the same setting, though it isn't on by default.
Also, sometimes if an archive is created with a newer version, older versions won't be able to extract it. Same deal with WinRar, at least until the 7z library of it gets updated, which is slower than just grabbing a new version of 7-zip.

Maybe in earlier versions, but in the newer ones, the archives are definitely not solid by default... at least, not in 9.20.

Besides, there's little point in creating solid archives, the gain in lower file size is almost unnoticeable, though I guess it is fine for archives with a single file only.