How is using ActivePatch different from an archiving program?
Archiving programs are designed to compress and store collections of files, and there are third-party toolkits that allow applications to create and manage these archives. The ActivePatch toolkit includes functions for managing collections of updated files which are called a package. Packages are similar in concept to archives. However, unlike the simple data compression used by archiving programs, ActivePatch only includes those files which have changed and only the changes within each specific file. This means that when compared to an archive of a collection of files, ActivePatch packages can be significantly smaller than archives created by programs like PKZip or WinZip.
