How to zip and unzip files

“Whether you’re freeing up storage space or sending lots of files to other people, Windows’ built-in file zipping will make your life so much easier”

- Carrie Marshall

If tech years are like dog years, then zip files were invented 217 years ago – and despite their age they remain incredibly useful things in 2020.

Zip files take a bunch of files and/or folders, squash them down and package them up as a single, smaller file that’s better for sending, for sharing on the likes of USB sticks and for freeing up hard drive space. And in Windows 10, zipping files is baked right into File Explorer.

The files we use today are a lot bigger than the ones we used to zip back in 1989. Back then, PCs with 10MB of hard disk space seemed pretty fancy; today, it’s not unusual for a single smartphone photo to be bigger than that. And that means zip files remain incredibly useful: for as long as we need to share, send or store digital files, we’ll want to zip them up to make them more portable.

Step-by-step Easy zips in just a few clicks

1 Find your files

The first thing you need when you’re zipping files is to find the files you want to zip. To do that, locate them in File Explorer and select the ones you want to zip. You can choose to select all the files in a folder [Ctrl] + [A]), or you can select some but not all of the files by holding down [Ctrl] and clicking the file(s) you want. You can select entire folders as well as or instead of files.

2 Find the zip