Writing your own code using AA is exceptionally well-supported by examples covering most use cases, and has now been supplemented with examples using encryption. aar, and by default are normally opened and immediately decompressed by Archive Utility. aea is the primary tool for working with Apple Encrypted Archives, with an extensive set of options for both compression and encryption.Īrchives compressed using AA’s LZFSE may have the obvious.

compression_tool provides rather simpler access to AA’s compression and decompression features, including choice of algorithm and control over the number of threads used. Monterey also comes with three command tools which provide good access to most of AA’s features.Īa is the grandfather, which has a wide range of verbs for archiving folders and files, extracting them, verification and conversion.

Although I normally prefer Archive Utility to work with Zip archives, it can both create AA archives and expand them, although it doesn’t appear to support encryption yet. It’s an app which is so useful that I routinely put it into the Dock to ensure I have direct access. The most recent account of AA in its current incarnation was that given by Jonathan Hogg at WWDC 2021, when he introduced Apple Encrypted Archives.ĪA is now the basis for compression-decompression provided by Archive Utility, which is tucked away in /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications. Because it has become extensively used in Apple’s operating systems, considerable work has been put into optimising its performance, particularly on ARM systems, where it’s thought to have the benefit of hardware assistance.ĪA was first opened up fully to third-parties in Big Sur, and is classed as part of Apple’s Accelerate libraries for high performance computation. This article is a general introduction before I dive deeper into how you can get the best from Apple Archive.Īpple first introduced AA’s primary compression scheme LZFSE (for Lempel-Ziv Finite State Entropy) back in OS X 10.9, and provided limited access for disk image compression in Mac OS X 10.11. This week I’m moving away from fractious external storage and looking in more detail at Apple Archive (AA), sometimes AppleArchive without the space, compression first opened up in Big Sur, and enhanced with encryption in Monterey.

Archive utility mac