WinZip can handle ZIP, TAR, gzip, and Unix compress format files by itself. External programs are required for the less frequently used ARJ, ARC, and LZH formats. ZIP files save time and space, and make downloading software and transferring email attachments 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.
Some files are important but used infrequently.
To save disk space simply compress these files into an archive when they are not used, and decompress them only when needed.