I'm working on a decomissioning project (for those who hear decomissioning for a first time – in corporate world this means removal of service/s or assigned resources of a server or a physical server hardware that is not to be used in future or is obsolete). The decomissioning includes removal of Apache Tomcat (Software Configuration Item CI – in HP terms) from Microsoft Windows 2007 – Service Pack 2.
Part of decomissioning is of course to create backup of Tomcat Application server and for that I needed to create compressed archive of Tomcat instances. Usually I do archives on Windows using Winrar or Winzip but this time as the server productive server has the minimum installed there was no any external vendor produced archiving software available.
My memories from past were that there is a native compressing program embedded into Windows as I've unzipped compressed archives on Win hosts with no need for external WinZip. However until so far I never did .ZIP archive with no available external uncompress software.
Using Winzip or Winrar so far to make archive from a number of files I used to select files to enter Archive press right mouse button and select Create Archive (Add To Archive) so I expected this will work whenever no Winrar, however there was no obvious button like this, so I googled a bit to find out how is that possible ending up on Article from Microsoft titled "Compress and uncompress files (zip files)", there is a dumb proof video teaching Compressing files with Microsoft default ZIP program is done by the the weird "Send To" menu 🙂
Selecting files to enter Archive;
–> (Click Right Mouse Button) -> (Send To Compressed Zipped Folder)
Honestly If I didn't checked the net probably I will never think of looking it there.