So I use Debian 12, and it came with Xarchiver. I personally have grown to dislike it, but it feels like there aren't any other archiving programs that look or feel like I'm using 7zip which is part of why I tolerated it for the last year. Now, however I can't get Xarchiver or any archiving tool at the moment to properly take a folder and turn it into a zip without crashing or freezing up. The folders aren't even that large, so it's a bit confusing. The only clue I have to what could be wrong is a message I got that hung up my computer when I tried to have it restart itself:

Note: "time" in this line is just how long it spent hung up on what this message is trying to say it's doing. I don't really know what it means other then it's probably just having trouble shutting a service down for restart. Thankfully it only took a couple minutes to clear and restart but I have concerns that it will do this again.

I've heard that 7zip is supposed to work for Linux but I've yet to get it to work on my machine. I've also tried Peazip and File Roller and I try not to be picky, but neither really function the way I expect them to and have the same issues regarding the recent freezing and crashing I'm having.

So I just need help with a few questions I have to see if I can resolve this:

1: What could be causing the lock ups when it was fine yesterday and how can I fix this?

and

2: What other archiving programs are out there for Linux that I can use that isn't just using the terminal?

Ark for KDE, Engrampa for MATE, File-roller for GNOME, LXQt Archiver for LXQt, Zipper.app for GNUstep. Also, Arqiver (Qt).

What do you expect?
Here is a list of GUI archive managers. They are basically front ends for the actual command line utilities.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lis...chive_managers

About the only suggestion would be to try running the particular command line compression utility and see what errors if any pop up. Could be a corrupted file or something the archive tool is not expecting.

Any more I just rsync whatever to my NAS or backup drive and don't use archives on the local network. I do use them for transferring stuff over the internet.

Anything for Xfce? Other then what I was using anyways..

At the moment I don't exactly have an archiver on my system at the moment. I had tried to install an add-on for Thunar but it didn't seem to work the way I expected it to. Thinking it just makes it easier to start the archiver process rather then being its own. Will test for errors once I pick something again.

Edit: I'm.. not really sure how to run the command line to check errors. 7z won't zip up the target and the only person I thought could help me in irl is a headless sysadmin and can't help me with gui issues. I have at least narrowed the problem to it just being the two folders I'm trying to pack up. As my name suggests I like gaming, and last night I installed two games via 20 year old physical discs. The games run great and I wanted to pack them up for ease of access in case I wanted to set them aside for a later time and I can't seen to make it work. Not with headless 7zip, not with xarchiver, file-roller, peazip or archive manager, and my headless sysadmin buddy keeps telling me to use tar but won't tell me how.

Last Edit: Never mind I found the issue. Installing the (windows) games meant making a virtual environment in the folders, and specifically the "dosdevices" folder was jamming up the works. Sorry for my inexperienced set of questions wasting everyone's time.

tar is installed by default and the basic command to tar (archive without compression) a directory is:

tar cvf /path/to/myfile.tar /directory/to/archive

To archive and compress.
tar cvzf /path/to/myfile.tar.gz /directory/to/archive

There are a bunch of options with tar. To extract the files to the current working directory:
tar -xvf myfile.tar (or whatever you named the file)

Always check your backup files to make sure you can restore them.

You can find lots of examples of taring files by searching the internet.