If you’ve used the application, the chances are at some point you’ll want to use it create an archive for yourself instead of just extracting everything. This is not a problem, but what happens if the data you want to compress is actually pretty confidential that you don’t want the general public to be able to access if they got a hold of the file? This is something you aren’t able to do in a lot of compression utilities but in this article we’re going to explain how you can do it in 7zip.
The first thing you need to do is go into Windows Explorer and then select the files and the folders that you want in the ZIP file. You must make sure they’re all selected which you can do by clicking and then dragging across the window so that all of the data you want is highlighted. Remember that everything selected will be included so don’t select something you won’t be happy for others to see. The more data inside the ZIP the greater the file size it’ll be too so bare that in mind. You then need to right click these files and then select the “Add to archive…” option.
You should find that the utility has opened as a result of this with many different options regarding how you want your file to be created. The first thing you need to do is change the archive format. If both of the people who receive it will be running on 7zip you can stick to the .7z file, whereas if people who may not have it installed on their systems may need to open it you should stick to the generic ZIP format which all compression tools should be able to provide support for.
Obviously the next thing you need to do is enable the encryption. The first thing you’ll need to do is enter the password and then the password confirmation into the menu shown to you. This should be fairly easy to find. Don’t use a personal password because you will need to give this out to anyone who wants to use it so choose something very generic that you won’t mind other people knowing. It’s also a good idea to change the encryption method to AES-256 because this is a lot more secure and makes it less likely for people to be able to break into it without knowing the password you’ve set.
In conclusion, using this piece of software to create your own password-encrypted ZIP file is actually very simple and only takes a few moments. We recommend that you try and keep the file size as small as possible by lowering the number of files you put into it as large ZIPs can prove to be difficult to distribute especially if it’s over the internet or something similar to that. A fairly generic password is a good idea too so that you don’t have to give out any personal information to the person that you want to open it. If this ZIP file is just going to be opened by you, of course you can set it to be whatever you want. 7zip makes it very easy to do a lot of things relating to compression so we recommend that you install it onto your computer now.
Tags: 7zip, encryption, zip