Archives are files that contain other files.
Typically the files in an archive are compressed. Archives usually have file names ending with ZIP, LZH, ARJ, or ARC, depending on how they were created. Archives make it easy to group files and make transporting and copying these files faster. It is often useful to send a group of related files to an associate. Rather than distributing individual files it is often easier to distribute the files as an archive to benefit from the file grouping and compression.