You're still here!

[JRV]

Have to say that I'm really pleased to see my old friend from the mid-to-late 90s, ZipMagic, alive and well in 2016. A brilliant product that tapped in to the extraordinary potential of Windows' APIs long before others saw the possibilities. Possibilities that 20-ish years later, too few see.

At that time, I was IT director for a prominent local architecture firm, whose users were baffled by PKZIP/PKUNZIP. ZipFolders made file compression trivial. That was a really big deal, back when 1.2MB floppies roamed the earth. We had plot files much larger than that. WinZip was around by then, but as crude then as now. There had to be a better way. And I found ZipMagic and bought licenses for all the machines.

Looking forward to becoming re-acquainted with ZipMagic, mainly for disk compression, on my wife's Asus Zenbook SSD. The "disk" is exquisitely thin, enabling it to be crammed into the exquisitly thin case. But capacity is far too small for all the pictures and videos she takes on her phone, and music she wants to sync. Problems we'd never have thought we'd have in the 90s!

Remembering DoubleSpace, DriveSpace, Stacker, et al, I Binged disk compression, and the name ZipMagic jumped off the page at me. A blast from the past. Will be installing shortly, when she can pry herself off Facebook...another problem we never knew we'd have in the 90's.

[admin]

Welcome back, JRV!

First off, we're not the same company that built ZIPmagic in the 90's (they were Mijenix). However, since Mijenix discontinued their product; we can be considered their spiritual successor. I'll give you a brief rundown of our differences:

1) Mijenix had a DOS-mode driver that made all ZIP files like folders, even on the command line. We don't have an NTFS driver to do that, but we use Explorer's shell namespace extensions to offer the same convenience (except the command line).

2) Mijenix did not support any non-ZIP file type. We support 80+ non-ZIP file types (including ZIPX for JPEG compression, RAR5 extraction, 7ZIP for the best file compression), and we're third party plug-in extensible.

3) Mijenix did not have any disk compression product. We do.

The original DoubleSpace, DriveSpace, and Stacker products of the 90's have been discontinued as well, of course. The new ZIPmagic may also be considered the spiritual successor of those. In fact, we've achieved 1-1 feature parity with these products in our recent releases:

a) Transparent disk compression, including re-compression; without requiring temporary external storage for imaging.

b) Projecting a customizable compression ratio for compressed disks.

c) Disk health tools, optimization, and uncompression options for compressed disks.

d) Disk read speed acceleration - even on already very fast SSD hardware!

Everything else should be exactly as you left it two decades ago, including the uniqueness of our "archives as folders" and disk compression.

Let us know if we did a good job of resurrecting these priceless 90's software products!

Welcome to the ZIPmagic family, and we're looking forward to your feedback.