What is a WACZ file? A WACZ file is a zipped web archive ( .WARC file). It contains website content and metadata retrieved using crawlers , for archival purposes. WACZ files use .ZIP formatting to allow web browsers to retrieve data from WARC archives more efficiently.

More Information The International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) created the Web ARChive (WARC) format to serve as a common standard for web archiving. The Webrecorder project created the WACZ format to make it easier for applications and users to access the data WARC files contain. Each WACZ file is a Zip-compressed WARC file, which uses a preset directory structure and indexes to organize the data the WARC file contains. Organizing and indexing the WARC file's data in this manner allows web browsers and other applications to selectively retrieve portions of data (such as a single webpage) from the WARC file, without having to process the entire file (which may contain a lot of data and be quite large in size).