StuffIt Standard
Version: 11
Downloads Count: 27,258
License Type: Trial
Price: $25
Date Added: Mar 12, 2008
Operating Systems: Macintosh, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista
Author: Smith Micro Software
- WinZip 680,301
- WinRAR 172,188
- Advanced ZIP Password Recovery 87,983
- ZipCentral 71,020
- PKZIP 62,545
Editor's Review of StuffIt Standard
StuffIt comes with its own compression format. Two formats, actually, .sit and the newer, more efficient .sitx. The StuffItX format is especially impressive when compressing JPEG images. Conventional wisdom says that .jpg files don't compress because they're compressed already. In my casual tests, StuffIt, when creating a .sitx archive, shrank these pictures by about 25 percent.
To extract .sit/.sitx files, non-Stuffit users will need to download and use the free Stuffit Expander utility.
StuffIt also manages .zip files (of course), but SmithMicro takes this beyond simply supporting the old, creaking .zip 2.0 standard. Version 9.5 can decrypt the 256-bit AES encryption that WinZip added in 2003 with version 9 (you'll still need the password, of course). Unfortunately, it can't create WinZip-compatible encrypted files. If you want better security than .zip 2.0's easily defeatable password protection, you'll have to create a .sitx archive (which can hide file names and supports RC4-512, AES-256, BlowFish-448, or DES-64 encryption).
StuffIt also can't segment ZIP archives (split them into multiple files of user-definable size), but it can do so with .sit/.sitx archives.
To make the most of such features, Stuffit Standard 9.5's wizards are a good place to start, and they're equal, if not better, than those of the other programs I looked at. Another nice touch: You can archive and FTP your files over the Internet--a useful tool for long-distance backup.
--Lincoln Spector
You can find the full review for StuffIt 9.5 and performance details for this program, and its competitors, at our Top 5 Compression Utilities chart.
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