In addition, you may also find valuable information in our FAQ . If you have any unanswered questions or require additional assistance, please feel free to contact us . Most of the datasets available through the Clearinghouse have been archived and compressed to make downloads quicker and more convenient. Archiving combines several files into a single file, while compression uses various algorithms to reduce overall file size. ZIP is one of the most commonly used archive formats and is the format typically used for Clearinghouse data.
ZIP software is available for nearly all operating systems.
ZIP utilities compress multiple files into a single download file. Some ZIP utilities, such as WinZip, can also handle the GZIP and TAR formats discussed below. ZipIt - provides ZIP support for Macintosh computers. GZIP is a common compression utility on Unix systems. Unlike ZIP utilities, however, GZIP can only compress a single file.