ISO's an interesting idea. I'm not sure it'll have any advantages over zip... any thoughts?

gzt: With the archivers you want zero compression, often called wrap. No point compressing things already compressed. You mentioned it, but it wasn't clear to me if the tests were performed with wrap. I recall that 7z has a choice of compression algorithm. If looking at iso could also look at vmdk/avhd.

I tested with no compression, store only.

gzt: Btw, what were the reasons for open source? For rar creation need to purchase but looks like 7z and many others support opening .rar.

Mostly that I didn't want to pay for Winrar, but also wider support if something goes wrong in the future.

Ah, but I'd rather not steal it, especially if there's alternatives.

timmmay:

 

Ah, but I'd rather not steal it, especially if there's alternatives.

 

AIUI, you can use the command line version of rar without payment. It can easily be scipted to do what you want.

Great, I'll look into that thanks :)

timmmay: ISO's an interesting idea. I'm not sure it'll have any advantages over zip... any thoughts? 

Not to sure. I've had corrupt zip files that I couldn't open but could always mount an ISO.

• ZIP limit = 4GB, ZIP64 = 16EB (but Windows Explorer only supports ZIP natively, not ZIP64), 
• ISO limit = 8TB

timmmay:

Ah, but I'd rather not steal it, especially if there's alternatives.

I'm thinking zip with par2 might be the answer. I'll keep the archives below 4GB, I don't like huge files for archiving anyway.