Among the wide variety of free archive utilities available out there, BandiZip stands out from the rest for several reasons – its wide support for all common archive types (including the option to open RAR files), its password manager, its password recovery utility, and its antimalware scan for PCs running on Windows 10.
The program’s Standard (free) edition has some severe limitations. When it comes to password recovery, this version will only deal with passwords with a maximum length of four characters. Besides, the password manager can store only one password, it cannot repair corrupted archives, it will only use a maximum of 16 (out of 64) threads for multi-core compression, and it won’t let you preview any recoverable file. If you wish to make use of all of these features, I advise you to upgrade to either the Professional of the Enterprise editions.
Thus, BandiZip’s Standard edition is a tool that basically creates new archives and opens and decompress existing ones, and that is what the program’s main menu offers. It can also edit archives, though – i.e., you can add or remove files from an archive file without extracting its contents and even change its name if needed. It supports all the most widely used archive file types, such as 7Z, ZIP, RAR, ARJ, or CAB, as well as ISO, IMG, or BIN images, to name but a few. (Note that because it’s a proprietary format, BandiZip can open and extract RAR files, but not create new ones.) Finally, BandiZip offers strong utilities to protect your archive files using AES-256 encryption, to compress files bigger than 4 GB, and to produce multi-volume ZIP and 7Z archives.
All in all, BandiZip is a useful archiving tool for those who simply need a program to extract and create commonly used archive files. The Standard free edition is a good place to start, but you may find its many limitations somehow annoying in time.
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