How to extract files _with_ keeping directory structure?

[kyna]

As a designer in the 90've done a lot of CDs and later DVDs of all my work. And as you know almost all of the files that he wrote a lot of space on your hard drive. For this amount of data backed up I was using compression first and then the ZIP RAR. And now, when BD is relatively cheaper than the DVD I'm going to copy all my old albums (some have over 15 years) and rewrite on BD already uncompressed, so my program WhereIsIt? will be able to generate thumbnails of all these files. And the first part is easy, I copied all of those hundreds of CDs and DVDs on my hard drive, but how to extract all the files at the same time preserving the directory structure?

For Mac is a program Unarchiver which I used until recently, who can do it, but I can not find its counterpart on Windows. I can search all the archives on the disk and just open them, and they will unpack into place.


Maybe one of you can help me find a easy and a similar solution to accomplish this task on my Windows 7 PC? I've tried with Winrar Rarsoft, but there is no option to extract files to the original path. All I can do is to select each batch of files in a subdirectory and manually select "Extract Here", but I have millions of catalogs, many automatically generated by programs. After 2 hours of manual unpacking, I made the first mistake and I had to copy all the data from CD again, because I need to have all my data intact.

Help?

 

[logicearth]

Where the files compressed with a folder structure? Otherwise I'm confused...I've never had to explicitly tell WinRAR or 7zip to preserve the folder structure they just did it...Tho...I just use the right click feature on the actual compressed file and tell it to "Extract here" type deal...I don't open it and manually select files.

 

[kyna]

No, no. I did not compress ENTIRE directories, but only files in those, so my cataloger was able to perform scan of the disk and all names of the files were same as archives and within directory. And remember, that something easy now to achieve was not that time, for Pentium 90, 133 or even G3 333 that was painfully slow process, archiving i mean. So archiving and unarchiving one file was not the same as archiving and unarchiving large amount of those. Also searching in BIG zip or rar could cause problems. Those were ancient times, archaic programs and OS...

And now i have directory structure with archived files in those, and no clue how to extract them at once so they will remain on place in their home directory and not the path established by the extracting program.

 

[snowdude]

Not sure I completely understand your problem but... have you tried 7-zip (7-zip.org) great program for working with archives. You can extract to a location and it will preserve the directory structure.

 

[kyna]

7zip is great but does same as others..

I'll try to explain one more time: on Mac i opened folder and got results on search for "*", so every single item in that folder was found - files and folders. Than that folder was sorted by kind and I selected all files only, w/o folders and compressed with option to put single file to single archive and delete original after (file and archive have same name then, when needed i can quick look to project file and determine name of that single file and search for that file by disk cataloger and quickly retrieve it from particular CD), and what is important Mac archiver was able to maintain original paths for files. So i have CD or DVD with dir tree and archives of single files in, and trying to extract those in original place, simply reverse process of compression - extract file in home subdir and delete archive after successful extraction (or not, cuz i can delete them in TC or Explorer by performing simple search).