TC4Shell

There are numerous archive formats out there and perhaps just as many archiving utilities, but if you don't want to keep too many applications installed on your computer, you can go for a simpler solution, like TC4Shell. It supports a vast range of archive formats and it makes archiving and file extraction quite easy. You can start any operation on the fly, while working with your files, from the Windows Explorer context menu.

TC4Shell is distributed as a freeware utility, for all modern Windows platforms. It comes in a small package and it can be installed in under a minute. Once the installation process is complete, you can choose to associate the software with specific archive types.

Installing TC4Shell is all you really have to do. There is no executable you have to look for and there is no main user interface, from which you can create new archives. If you need to archive your files, you only need to select them, right click them and choose one of the new options, added by the software to the context menu.

You can choose different archive formats from the context menu. Once your selection is made, a settings panel will show up immediately, on which you can make some essential tweaks. Besides setting an output path, you can also encrypt and password-protect your archive. The software can use ZipCrypto or the AES 256-bit encryption algorithm, which can be selected on another window.

If you need to add only a certain kind of files to an archive and they are all dumped into a single folder, TC4Shell's filtering options can spare you from cherry-picking the files. You can just tell the application to include nothing but files with certain names or extensions. Another useful feature is the possibility of splitting archives into multiple bits, which can have a size of your choice. This can be quite useful if you have too store data on multiple low-capacity devices. Also, the archiving process takes only a few seconds, so workflow won't get affected.

Archiving files can be an effortless task, which takes only a few seconds, thanks to TC4Shell's clean and straightforward functionality.