Purrchiver Help

Welcome to Purrchiver — a clean Mac archive utility. No ads, no subscriptions, no tracking, just a tool that opens, extracts, creates, edits, encrypts, and automates archives — and single files too — without getting in your way.

This is the help site Purrchiver’s Help → Purrchiver Help menu (⌘?) opens in your default browser — there is no separately bundled Help Book in the app. Every error message in Purrchiver links here via “Learn more →” when a relevant page exists.

Start here

• Getting started — first launch, the core concepts, and where everything lives.
• What’s free vs. the unlock — Purrchiver is free to download and extract anything; one optional one-time purchase unlocks the advanced authoring features. Here’s exactly where the line is.

Open & extract

• Opening an archive — every way to open an archive in Purrchiver.
• Extracting files — pulling files out of an archive (one file, some files, or everything).
• Extracting several archives at once — drop a batch of archives, pick one destination, Purrchiver works through them.
• Quick Look preview — press Space in Finder to see what’s inside an archive without opening it.
• Multi-part archives — .part01.rar + .part02.rar, .r00/.r01/.r02 sequences, .7z.001/.002, etc.

Create & encrypt

• Archive, compress & encrypt — how they compose — the three independent tools, used alone or stacked in any combination.
• Creating a new archive — turning files and folders into a .zip, .7z, .tar.gz, or any other supported format.
• Compress or encrypt a single file — gzip/xz/Zstandard/Brotli a lone file, or wrap it in an encrypted age envelope — no container needed.
• Encrypted archives — creating password-protected archives with AES-256 and opening encrypted ones from others.
• age encryption — the universal passphrase wrap that encrypts any container or file, even ones no other Mac archiver encrypts.
• Compression presets — save a bundle of compress options and reuse it from the Create picker.
• Editing an existing archive — adding and removing entries inside an archive you already have (⌘E enters Edit mode).
• Disk images (.dmg) — opening, extracting, and creating .dmg disk images (and when to mount one in Finder instead).

Automate & integrate

• Drag and drop — drop targets, drag promises, and every supported gesture.
• Finder integration — the five Purrchiver entries in Finder’s right-click → Services menu.
• Shortcuts & automation — the full set of Shortcuts / App Intents actions for archiving by automation, Siri, or Spotlight.
• The Tools menu — the standalone pick-and-do catalog: create, extract, verify, compress, encrypt, all from the menu bar.
• Keyboard shortcuts — the full shortcut reference.
• Settings — what each preference does, with sane defaults explained.

Reference

• Format support — the full read/write matrix, with the unlock marked on each write.
• Legacy & niche formats — what Purrchiver detects but doesn’t extract (ACE, BinHex, MacBinary, LZO, LRZIP, grzip) and what to use instead.

Privacy & security

• Privacy & security — exactly what Purrchiver does and doesn’t do with your data, with verification steps.
• Decompression-bomb safety — the “possible decompression bomb” preflight prompt and the other layered protections.
• Sending crash reports — opt-in only; what gets sent and what doesn’t.
• Diagnostic logs — what Purrchiver logs, how to view it, and how to send a sanitized log to support.

Troubleshooting

• Common errors — what each error message means and how to fix it.
• StuffIt files (.sit / .sitx) — why Purrchiver doesn’t open them and what to use instead.

Need more help?

Email corey@purrchiver.app. Email goes directly to the developer — there’s no support queue, no chatbot, no auto-responder.