To transfer files over network connections or transport them on removable media, it is desirable to limit the size to some limits, which are determined by the network bandwidth or the capacity of the removable media. With files whose sizes do not fit into these frames, you have to carry out additional manipulations - compression or splitting into parts. As a rule, archiving programs are used for these purposes.
Instructions
Step 1
Install an archiving application on your system if it is not already in your arsenal of utilities. The WinRAR archiver is the most common among Russian-speaking computer users today, and WinZIP is still preferred in the rest of the European part of the continent and on the American continent. The competition between these two market leaders is the free 7-ZIP app. Whichever option you choose, any of them will provide the ability to use any of these three archiving formats, and in addition, a whole range of third-party formats. Below are the use cases using the WinRAR archiver as an example.
Step 2
Find the file on your computer that you want to compress. During the installation process, the archiver program adds additional functions to Windows Explorer, so it is not necessary to launch the program itself and use it to search for the desired file. Use the method you are accustomed to - for example, if you store all the files on your desktop, then just right-click the desired file. The same can be done by running Explorer (win + e), and by going to the folder where the file is stored.
Step 3
Select one of the items related to archiving in the context menu - there should be several of them. For example, if the file is named BigFile.psd, then click the Add to Archive BigFile.rar line. The archiver will compress the file using the default settings and create a file with the specified name in the same folder. If you select the "Add to archive" item in the context menu, the application will open a window in which you can independently select the settings for the archive being created. The setting responsible for the compression ratio of the file is placed on the "General" tab and has the heading "Compression method". Select one of the six options in the drop-down list, keeping in mind that the time it will take to compress and then unpack the archive depends on this choice. Press the "OK" button to start the procedure.
Step 4
Certain types of files (like videos) are already compressed almost to the limit, so archiving them will not have a significant effect. In this case, you can take advantage of the archiver's ability to create multivolume archives, that is, split the file into several parts of a given size, which, after moving them over the network or on removable media, are easily assembled into the original file. To do this, select the "Add to archive" item in the context menu, and then, in the "Divide into volumes in size …" field, specify the maximum size of each multivolume archive file. For example, entering 100m in this field will set the limit to one hundred megabytes, and 500k equals 500 kilobytes.
