If a .zip file contains all of the information of the original, just in less space, why does it have to be unzipped to access any of it?
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You have a list of letter combinations. AAA, BBBB, CC, D, etc.
You don’t wanna waste paper because you need all the space you can have for other things you wanna write.
So you simplify the list of letters by saying “Ax3, Bx4, Cx2” etc. This is called compression. A lot of information stored digitally isn’t stored as conveniently or neatly as it could be by default.
Compressing a file in a zip or rar achieves this by taking the data and simplifying it into shorthand basically.
Once extracted, the data is still there because all you did was shorten the information by writing it more efficiently.
Disclaimer: this does not apply as easily to media such as images, video, or audio. Those actually DO remove some of the data in compression, but only enough so that the file can be reliably compressed into something that’s still of decent quality when decompressed. That’s done by removing extra frames in a video, pixels in an image, or frequencies in an audio file.
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