File Extension 7Z

File Extension 7Z

Files with file extension 7Z are produced by compression software 7-Zip. 7-Zip is an open source free software.

7Z is a new compression format providing following compression features:

• Open architecture
• High compression ratio
• Strong AES-256 encryption
• Ability of using any compression, conversion or encryption method
• Supporting files with sizes up to 16000000000 GB
• Unicode file names
• Solid compressing
• Archive headers compressing

Default method of compression 7Z format is LZMA. This method implements improved and optimized version of LZ77 algorithm.

Files with file extension 7Z also support following algorithms: LZMA2, PPMD, BCJ, BCJ2, BZip2, Deflate.

7-Zip also supports encryption with AES-256 algorithm. This algorithm uses cipher key with length of 256 bits. To create that key 7-Zip uses derivation function based on SHA-256 hash algorithm. A key derivation function produces a derived key from text password defined by user. For increasing the cost of exhaustive search for passwords 7-Zip uses big number of iterations to produce cipher key from text password.

Similar file extensions

• File Extension RAR - RAR compression format
• File Extension ZIP - ZIP compression format
• File Extension GZ - GZip compression format