Encrypted Archives and Passwords

The Archive Password Manager

BetterZip can collect all the passwords you enter and save them in your OS X keychain. Whenever you open an encrypted archive, BetterZip can try these passwords and use the correct one automatically. Alternatively, BetterZip can display all the passwords in a list in the password panel, so you can easily choose the one to use. For security reasons, this feature can be disabled completely.

To activate the password manager and modify the list of passwords, go to the tab Passwords in the preferences window. First, you need to set a master password that guards the password manager's settings and passwords. To do this click the button Set Master Password and enter your desired password twice. From now on you can click the lock and enter the master password to gain access to the password manager configuration.

The pop-up button at the top lets you choose how the passwords should be used. You will notice an extra menu item Automatically try passwords, except for RAR archives. With some RAR archives it can only be decided whether the password was valid or not after the complete archive was extracted. You don't want to extract a large archive over and over again to try all your 57 passwords in the list. But if you know exactly what you are doing, you can have BetterZip try the passwords for RAR archives as well.

Password Suggestions

BetterZip can suggest strong passwords whenever you need to enter a new password. These suggestions will be displayed in a popover next to the password textfield in a similar way to Safari. However, BetterZip tries to suggest memorable passwords, but you can also switch it to be of the same format that Safari uses. To accept the suggestion, click the password in the popover and it will be copied to the password textfield. Click the refresh button on its right side and a new password will be generated.