Guides

Plain answers to the format problems Macs are worst at. Each guide stands on its own — no app required to read it, and several of them will tell you to use something other than Purrchiver where that’s the right answer.

Encryption

• age encryption on macOS — what a .tar.zst.age file is, why age works on formats that have no encryption of their own, and how it compares to the age CLI.
• Open a .crypto file on macOS — someone sent you a MacPaw Encrypto file. What it is, what opens it, and why “only Encrypto can read it” isn’t true.

Old archives

• .sit, .sitx, and .hqx files on macOS — you found an old Mac backup and nothing opens. What each format is and what still extracts it.
• How to open a .sit file on macOS — the StuffIt story specifically, including what that “StuffIt Expander implementation is missing” error means.

Working with archives

• Multi-part archives on macOS — .part01.rar, .r00/.r01, .7z.001. One archive split across many files, and which one to open.
• Compress a DMG on macOS — making a disk image smaller, and getting files out of one without mounting it.
• Zstandard, Brotli, LZ4 and lzip on macOS — modern compressors in a native app instead of a shell pipeline.

Reference

• Benchmarks — measured wall-clock speed and compression ratio for every format Purrchiver writes, head-to-head against the native command-line tool for each, on Apple silicon.
• Help — the full in-app documentation, thirty topics deep.