Support for compressed file formats has expanded over the years just as the number of different types of archive has increased. OS X includes built in support for the creation and extraction of certain archives, but there are numerous other formats that you may encounter. There are countless third party compression and decompression tools available and iPckr is on such free tool available for Mac users – and the fact that it is free of charge does not mean that you are missing out on features.

Starting with the basics, the app can be used to extract the contents of 7z, zip, rar, gz and bz2 archives as well as creating them in 7z, zip and rar formats. It’s good to see that there is two-way support for rars as this is a format that is often only support for decompression. Unfortunately, in order to active this feature you need to ensure that you have a valid copy of RAR installed, but it still means that all of your archive needs can be catered for in one place.

If you use archive formats to backup files on your computer, the handy search option will prove very useful. It is possible to search within compressed archives, and phrase highlighting makes it easier to spot the files that match your search terms. For the quick creation of archives, there is a drop zone that can be used to reduce this tasks to a single step and 64-bit support means that the program performs very quickly.

iPackr can also be used to work with multi-volume archive but one of the most useful features is the ability to convert between formats. This is great if you are looking to share files with someone using a different platform or want to ensure that a file that is to be made available online can be opened by as many people as possible – you can convert from 7z, zip, rar, gz and bz2 to 7z, zip and rar formats.