Creation date support inside Zip archives

Conclusion is to use 7-Zip from now on.

Selecting my new Windows archiver

Important features for me to consider:

1. Properly integrate into shell context menu
2. Ability to store file creation dates, by default
3. Support extended list of archive formats Zip, but also GZip, Tar, and RAR is desirable also.

Install all of possible candidates with

scoop install 7zip nanazip peazip bandizip winrar

7-Zip

7-Zip can store file creation time inside 7z and Zip archives, using various switches. User can set time parameter options, permanently, inside GUI under Options.

In my experience, it is much faster than WinRAR in decompressing Zip files.

NanaZip is a fork of 7-Zip with improved on Windows design - I didn’t see any improvements.

WinRAR

For years, I’ve been using WinRAR archiver, and I was generally pleased, until now. The reason is that I didn’t find an easy way to store file creation date within the archive, by default.

I was always also always bothered by the fact that I was using “keygen” register key to get normal functionality.

WinRAR has options to set time inside “Time” tab.

WinRAR will store creation dates in RAR but not in Zip format.

Other tools

• PeaZip is considered as the best reviewed alternative to WinRAR, only after 7-Zip.

• Bandizip

Archive File Formats

Support for creation date in common archive file formats

File creation date inside Zip or RAR archives.

1. Zip file format does NOT store file creation time, only modification time.

• RAR supports creation date out of the box, both 4.x and 5.x file format versions

• TAR file format doesn’t support file creation date as Linux does not support it either. Linux uses only the last access and last modification times.

• 7-Zip can set time parameter options inside GUI under Options.

How to extract with creation time

The tools I use the most are Total Commander internal archiver and WinRAR or 7-Zip.

1. Even if creation date is present inside archive, Total Commander internal Unzip doesn’t properly set file creation date, and only extracts modification date
2. 7-Zip extracts every timestamp, without any special options set (both Zip, RAR but not TAR)
3. WinRAR extractor does set every timestamp properly if you set “File time” options in “Advanced” tab (Zip and RAR, but not TAR)