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Archives (Extract and Compress)

Open and create archives such as ZIP without leaving the app. Everything lives under Archive ▶, at the top level of the right-click menu.

Its contents swap depending on what you selected. With only archives selected you get the extraction commands; with anything else you get the compression commands. Showing both at all times would mean reading the list every time to work out which half currently applies. If even one non-archive is mixed into the selection, you get the compression side.

Where the destination is already decided, the resulting folder or file name appears in the command itself, so you can read what will happen before pressing. Folders carry a trailing \, so they are distinguishable from files.

  • With archives selected — extraction
  • Extract... — opens a folder picker. Since you chose the destination yourself, the contents go straight into it
  • Extract here — puts the contents straight into the folder you are viewing
  • Extract to "(name)\" — creates a folder named after the archive and extracts into it (release.tar.gz gives you a release folder). If a folder of that name already exists, a new name is used, so contents never get mixed together. With several archives selected this becomes Extract each to its own folder
  • Extract to pane (A / B) — extracts into the folder open in the other pane, inside a folder named after the archive. No extracting and then copying. It is not shown when the other pane has no folder open

  • Test archive — reads the archive through to the end without writing a single byte, to tell you whether it is damaged. Use it when you want to know a download was truncated before extracting and littering your disk (see Detecting damage below)

  • With anything else selected — compression

  • Compress... — opens a dialog for the destination folder and file name
  • Compress to "(name).zip" — bundles the selection into one ZIP. The name comes from the single selected item, or from the current folder when several are selected
  • Compress each to its own ZIP — produces one ZIP per selected item (shown only with two or more selected)

  • Create ZIP in pane (A / B) — puts the resulting ZIP in the other pane's folder

  • Supported formats

Operation Formats
Extract ZIP / TAR / TAR.GZ (.tgz)
Compress ZIP

7z and rar are not built in. The components that read them are large and complex, and serious vulnerabilities are found in them nearly every year; bundling one would make its vulnerabilities Zenith Filer's vulnerabilities. Those formats are left to Explorer's own support (Windows 11 24H2 and later) or to your installed copy of 7-Zip — reachable with Shift + right-click for the OS menu. What is built in uses only components that ship with Windows; no external component was added.

  • Safety rules: extracting means opening contents you did not write. These protections are always in effect.

  • Nothing is written outside the destination. The trick of slipping ..\ into a file name to write into a parent or system folder is blocked by resolving the real path and confirming it stays inside.

  • Shortcut (symbolic link) entries are discarded. Harmless-looking in themselves, they become the foothold that lets later files be written outside the destination.
  • An archive that expands abnormally is cut off part-way, so a small file cannot keep expanding until it fills the disk; extraction stops the moment more data arrives than the archive declared.
  • Windows reserved names such as CON and NUL, and alternate data streams hidden in a file name (readme.txt:other content), are not extracted.
  • The total extracted size is checked against the free space before anything is written.

Rejected entries are not discarded silently — the summary at the end reports "N unsafe entries were skipped".

  • Detecting damage: being readable and being intact are not the same thing. If the archive's structure survives, extraction goes through even when the data inside is corrupted, and a damaged file is left behind wearing a perfectly healthy name — the worst possible outcome. For ZIP, the contents are therefore checked during extraction against the checksum (CRC-32) recorded in the archive, and files that fail are removed rather than left behind, with the summary saying what went wrong. Test archive runs the same check without writing anything. Note that TAR and TAR.GZ carry no per-file checksum at all, so there the check can only confirm the archive's structure and, for gzip, that decompression succeeds.

  • When a name already exists: nothing is overwritten by default (the file is saved under a new name). If there are collisions you get the same confirmation used for copying, offering overwrite, skip or rename.

  • Garbled names in older ZIPs: ZIPs created on Japanese Windows and similar systems may not store names in UTF-8. A ZIP without the UTF-8 marker is read using your system's code page, so names come out intact — the same behaviour as Explorer and 7-Zip.

  • Ctrl+Z puts it back. Undo removes only what this operation created. Files that were already there, and anything you placed in the folder yourself after extracting, are left alone.

  • Pricing: extracting is free. Creating a ZIP is limited to 3 uses in the free version.