When you need to send a large archive via e-mail or stored ina floppy disk, you must take care about the file size. Even if you connect to the Internet through high speed connections, sending a large file may become a problem because many ISP put a size limit to the attachments you can send via e-mail; moreover, floppy disk still are the most used removable media in certain countries where CD burners still have high prices. In this case you have to build a Multivolume archive, which is the original archive divided in smaller parts.

Multivolume features are in the "Multivolume Archives" section of Actions menu and are:

• Disk Span - this action lets you divide the archive in smaller parts
• Disk Unspan - this action lets you rebuild the original archive on your hard disk

ZipGenius way of creating multivolume archives is different from other program and it is a bit more logic:

1. First of all, you have to create a ZIP archive as you usually do;
2. click on "Disk Span" to start splitting the archive.

This procedure lets you modify your archive until the second before you start to split it, because ZipGenius doesn't write spanned archives directly when you create a new one: you can create and correct your archive as you want (or need), then you can split it in smaller parts.

You will see a dialog where you can choose the destination unit for the spanned archive. As you can see, you can choose even an hard disk: in that case ZipGenius will ask you where to create a subfolder labeled "ZipGenius Span Output", which will contain the resulting file parts. This option is useful when you don't want to send file parts directly to a floppy disk set, or when you need to send file parts through the Internet. Choose the floppy disk unit to span archive on a set of floppy disks.

If you choose an hard disk as destination, you must select a size for the file parts being created. ZipGenius offers some default sizes to choose between, but you can set a custom size in bytes.

On the contrary, if you choose to span archive on a set of floppy disks, ZipGenius will start that action and will require the first disk you want to use; the program will check it and if disk isn't empty, ZipGenius will ask if you want to erase it. WARNING: erasing the floppy disk will make you lose any kind of data stored into that.

The resulting file parts will have different file extensions:

• .ZIP - this will be the only file you can read with zip programs
• .z01 .. .zXX - these will be the file parts and they can't be read by zip programs

Warning: ZipGenius has adopted this new spanning scheme, which is compatible with WinZip«, but other zip program may fail to read archives spanned in this way.

The reverse action is labeled "Disk Unspan" and it is used to rebuild the original archive. You will be prompted to select a folder where to recreate the archive and the program will do the rest.

Antivirus | Multivolume archives | Encryption | Scan and Zip | ZG Album | Command Line | Exporting files list | Backup features | OpenOffice.org documents optimization | WinAmp/WMP skins optimization | Search features | MultiOpen