Archiver, 7z Alternative and FreeArc Replacement

[Registered55]

Thanks for the guidance! To give you the exact context of what I'm aiming for:

My use case is "compress once, store forever" (archiving game ISOs like PlayStation 3 dumps and heavy media libraries onto a home NAS). Compression time and CPU/RAM load don't matter at all—I have a 32GB system and I want to squeeze out the absolute maximum space savings.

Once I lock down the ideal settings, my ultimate goal is to wrap this into a PowerShell batch script so the whole pipeline runs completely hands-off. I've experimented with MiniCompressor and DiskSpan 2 in the past, but getting them to cooperate reliably in unattended batch modes proved difficult. Because your archiver.exe is built from the ground up as a standalone entity, it opens up fantastic automation options.

Before I write the wrapper script, I'd love to clarify a couple of quick technical details on how your native algorithms behave:

addex vs. rep: Are both addex and rep fully baked natively inside archiver.exe, or do they rely on external binaries? Furthermore, is addex essentially the advanced evolution of rep for scattered matches (using SREP-inspired logic, as you mentioned)?

Parameter Syntax / .ini behavior: When I tried passing -mrep:m3 directly via the command line, the -m3 parameter seemed to be ignored, and I had to manually edit the .ini file to force it from level 1 to level 3. Is there a specific syntax I should be using in the command string to pass parameters directly to rep or addex without touching the .ini file?

More than anything, seeing a couple of working example command lines (e.g., a standard balanced profile and a max-compression profile using XZ or Oodle combined with your native dedup) would be immensely helpful. It's less about copy-pasting the strings directly, and more about seeing the exact syntax grammar, parameter formatting, and delimiter rules for how your tool's parser expects everything to be structured.

If you can share a couple of reference examples along those lines, I'd love to test them out and start building the PowerShell automation script!

so far i have been building something like this

archiver.exe a "R:\PS3\TEST\bejeweled_3_archive.arc" "R:\PS3\TEST\bejeweled 3 [BLUS30865]" -mprecomp:creflate:czlib:cpng:clz4:czstd:cflac:cbrunsli:cpackjpg:cpackmp3:ckraken:b1024:t50p:d2:dd+srep+xz:l9:d512:t8 -b4096m --tempdir="C:\Archiver\temp"

but to be clear, i'm learning as i go and no idea if i'm on thr right track, but so far this is the latest string i have cobbled together lol.

another issue i have been having, i'm finding it difficult to get archiver to go above 35% of cpu usage, when it starts it jump to around 50-60% great, but as it gets to stage 2 and 3, the cpu goes down to 35% leaving a lot of CPU performance on the floor.

i have tried playing around with threads, but knowing where to put the -t options where and what number has so far alluded me.

one more thing is, let's say i wanted to run lolz (i have found this in your external archive) where would this be placed in the command string?