Zip it up!

One of my favourite blog subjects is free software, over the years I have highlighted a number of freeware programs on Munny4Hunny.
I live (in a PC sense) by the creed that more or less any type of software you need can be found somewhere for free, and my latest 'find' has been a file zipping program which I have found extremely useful. One of my online activities involves converting analogue sound into digital format which tends to take up a lot of hard drive space especially after a few edits. I use a 500GB drive to store the files which holds a lot of data, but I also like to back everything up and my backup drive is only 250GB... My solution has been to 'zip' all my files and store the zip files as a backup - this has saved me approx 50GB of storage (both on my internal hard drive and my backup). I searched for some zip programs and a lot were limited trial, but 7-zip is totally free, and has lots of options for higher compression and even zipping to the exact size of a DVD for those who plan to back up onto DVD (where the resulting file will need to be fitted onto more than one disk), and as this is my ultimate goal, I can see how valuable this option is.
I would have liked a greater compression rate such as some of the RAR programs offer, but nonetheless, this software seems very easy to use and certainly does what I wanted and more...