Recently, a user asked why they needed to rename files in a zip4 set in order to open them in DirMaster. The short answer is, you don't - as long as they have the standard 1! style prefix. Another user asked what the best way to open a zip4 archive is. We'll illustrate this with a short video showing a situation where you have a four-part zip4 set and you'd like to unarchive and open that:
That's it! Here's a couple other points of interest:
- You only need to drag and drop one of the files in order to uncompress the entire set as long as all four files are in the same directory - as shown in the video. It isn't necessary to drag the first part, any part will do.
- You can actually open an incomplete zip4 set. In case you're missing a part but think you may still be able to recover files or data, just drag a part and DirMaster will uncompress what it can, even a single part. Be aware that the 3rd part has the directory track and if you're missing that part, the resulting disk image will look empty (a blank directory) - but it still has the track data from the parts DirMaster could locate.
An obvious followup question is how can you easily extract a zip4 set off of another disk image? Let us again illustrate, this time a situation where we've received a disk image "zipped.d64" which itself contains a zip4 set:
The key take away here is that you can extract a zip4 as well as any other recognized archive format using the right click menu item, "Uncompress", or just select the file you want to unarchive and hit the 'z' key. The caveats for missing parts also apply here - DirMaster will try to locate all parts on the disk image and work with them.
If you have questions about how to best use DirMaster, you can contact us here.