Creating an archive transforms copies of a set of objects (folders, documents etc.) into one compact document that saves storage space and download time. Creating an archive is especially useful for downloading numerous or big files as fast and cost-effectively as possible.

Making and extracting an archive can be used for uploading multiple files to a workspace just as well: for documents of MIME types Tar and Zip/Winzip, BSCW offers the extract action that re-creates in your clipboard the files (= documents) included in the archive that you produced locally.

Compression typically further reduces the file size of a document, i.e. the storage space requirements and the time to download an archive document.

Note:

In order to open an archive stored in a workspace each member must have the necessary extraction programs installed on their machines and have configured their Web browser to start these programs when they encounter the MIME type of a (encoded) archive file.

• select (checkmark) the entries of the objects that you want to include in the archive file.
  (Your clipboard may be helpful in bringing together objects from "distant" locations that you need to include in one archive file.)
• click  Archive   on the button bar for selected objects to bring up the 'Archive' form. It includes a menu of the archive types that BSCW can produce, and the compression/encoding that may be applied to the archive file.
• enter the name of the archive document, select the archive type and the encoding to be applied, and confirm your selection.

BSCW will write the archive document to your clipboard (cf. section 3.6.1) and then display a form which lets you immediately download the document.

Note:

The archive formats cannot incorporate the meta information (ownership of documents, history of actions, description etc.) that BSCW maintains for each object. The meta information is ignored in the archiving process.

In particular, all information about members and roles of workspaces is lost in the archiving process, i.e. workspaces are archived as simple folders.