F.A.Q.

Registration and Registration Keys

Q: I haven't received my key after I bought BetterZip.
A: If you are using a free e-mail service like GMail, your transaction may be subjected to extended fraud checking, which is required by credit card companies. If your key doesn't arrive within 8 hours, please contact me.

Q: My registration key doesn't work.
A: Please, make sure that you copy the complete code (four lines of numbers and letters, ending with an equal sign into the text field in the registration window.

Q: I have lost my registration key. Can you resend it, please?
A: Of course. Enter your e-mail address into this form (this is a free service).

Compression and Extraction

Q: I want to extract an archive, but BetterZip asks for a password. What's that about?
A: The archive's creator probably encrypted the archive and protected it with a password. Ask the creator for the correct password. In rare cases the archive is corrupted, but BetterZip cannot recognize this. If you downloaded the archive from the Internet, try downloading it again. The password has nothing to do with the BetterZip registration code.

Q: I compressed a PDF, JPG, MP3, MOV, or AVI file, but the compressed file is not much smaller than the original file. What's wrong?
A: Nothing is wrong. Multimedia files like music, images, and videos are usually already compressed as good as possible. Compressing them with an archiver cannot squeeze out many more bytes from the file.

Q: I dragged a Pages 09 document into an empty archive window. BetterZip did not add the document, but shows some funny files instead. What's wrong?
A: The Pages document is actually a zip file. When you drag it into an empty window, BetterZip thinks that you want to open it and shows you the contents of the zip file instead of adding it to an empty archive. Hold down the command key while dropping a Pages document or any other archive into an empty BetterZip window. This will force BetterZip to add the file.

Q: Someone sent me this Word file and I couldn't open it, but BetterZip was able to extract it. Now Word cannot open the files I extracted.
A: You have probably received a new Word docx file, and use Word 2004. You should not extract such files, but instead get the Microsoft file converter from here. Install the converter and run your files through it. For further support with this, please contact Microsoft.

Q: Why doesn't BetterZip display the compressed sizes of files in tgz and tbz archives as well as in certain RAR and 7z archives?
A: This is due to the way these formats work: First an uncompressed tar archive is created then this tar file is compressed with BZip2 or GZip, which are both limited to compressing one file. So, tar has no knowledge about the compression factors while GZip and BZip2 don't have knowledge about the contents of the tar file.

Some RAR and 7z archives are compressed with the solid option which leads to better compression ratios. With this option files are not compressed individually, but all together. The compression ratio can thus not be reported on a file level, but only on the archive level.

Other Questions

Q: I don't like that BetterZip brings a Finder window to the front every time I do a 1-Click-Extract.
A: You can turn that off in the preferences. Go to the tab Advanced and uncheck the option Reveal destination in Finder after extraction.

Q: Are you planning to add Finder contextual menus and AppleScript and Automator support and how long do we have to wait for that?
A: Yes and yes and not long. But there is no date scheduled yet. Just turn on update checking in the preferences window and you will be notified automatically.

Q: How can I uninstall BetterZip?
A: Delete BetterZip.app from your Applications folder. Open the folder Library/Preferences in your home folder and remove the file com.macitbetter.betterzip.plist. That's all.