Unzip files online

When an online extractor is the practical choice

Every desktop system can open a plain ZIP, but the moment someone sends a RAR or a 7z, you are often stuck: Windows only gained native support for these formats recently, older versions and many work laptops have none, Chromebooks and phones handle them poorly, and installing an archiver on a managed office PC usually needs an administrator.

Opening the archive in the browser solves those cases:

• A client sends project files as .rar and you are on a locked-down work computer.
• You only need one document out of a 2 GB backup and do not want to unpack everything.
• You are on a Chromebook or a borrowed machine where you cannot install software.
• You want to check what is inside an attachment before extracting anything to your disk.

How it works without uploading

The extractor is built on libarchive, the open-source library that also powers the tar command on macOS and BSD systems. It is compiled to WebAssembly and runs in a background worker inside your browser tab. The archive is read directly from your disk by the page; it is never sent anywhere. That makes the tool suitable for contracts, payroll exports or source code that should not pass through third-party servers.

After you drop a file, the archive is opened and its full contents are listed, sorted by path, with each file's uncompressed size. Every file is selected by default. From there you can:

• Click the download button on any single file to save just that file.
• Untick what you do not need and download the rest in one go. If more than one file is selected, they are packed into a single ZIP named after the original archive, with -extracted added, and the folder structure is kept inside it.

The bundled ZIP is stored without recompression. Extracted files are usually already compressed formats such as JPG, MP4 or DOCX, so packing them again would cost time for almost no size gain.

The formats, briefly

• ZIP — the universal format from 1989, readable everywhere. Compression is moderate; encryption is either the weak legacy ZipCrypto or AES-256.
• RAR — a proprietary format popular for large downloads and multi-volume sets. Both RAR4 and the newer RAR5 are supported for reading.
• 7z — the 7-Zip format, typically 10–30% smaller than ZIP on text and code thanks to LZMA2 compression, with AES-256 encryption.
• TAR, TAR.GZ, TAR.BZ2, TAR.XZ — the Unix family. TAR only bundles files; GZ, BZ2 and XZ compress the bundle. Common for source code, server backups and Linux software.
• ISO — a disc image; you can browse it and pull individual files out without burning or mounting it.
• CAB — Microsoft's cabinet format, found inside installers and driver packages.

Password-protected archives

If a ZIP archive is encrypted (ZipCrypto or AES-256), the tool tells you the archive is password-protected and shows a password field. Type the password, then download as usual; it is checked when the first file is extracted, and a wrong password produces a clear "Wrong password" message rather than corrupted files.

Encrypted RAR and 7z archives are the exception: the browser engine can read their structure but cannot decrypt them, so the tool says so instead of asking for a password. Open those with a desktop archiver such as 7-Zip, WinRAR or The Unarchiver.

There is no way to recover a forgotten password here, and no brute-force option. Passwords are case-sensitive, and copying one from an email or chat sometimes brings a trailing space with it, which is the most common reason a correct password is rejected.

Common problems

• "Could not open this archive." The file is probably damaged or incomplete, most often an interrupted download. Compare its size with what the sender expected and download it again. A file with a misleading extension, for example a renamed .exe, also fails here.
• Split archives such as .part1.rar, .z01 or .7z.001 cannot be opened, because each part is only a fragment of one archive. Join or extract them with a desktop archiver.
• Very large archives slow down or stop. Archives up to 1 GB are accepted, but extraction happens in your device's memory. On a phone or a tablet, a 700 MB archive may exceed the browser's limit; extract fewer files at a time, or use a computer.
• Names look garbled. Old ZIP files made on Windows in non-Latin languages sometimes store file names in a legacy code page. The contents are intact; only the names need to be fixed after saving.

If you need to go the other way and pack files for sending, use Create ZIP, which also runs entirely in your browser.