Duplicating wordpress install issue

I wonder if anyone could help me with a problem that I am having. I am having a guy do some plugin/theme customization on my wordpress site and he wants to have a duplicate of the site to work with on localhost. I have sent the mysql database and a copy of the wordpress site in a folder to him or suggested he just work on our 'live' site to get this response. I was wondering whether anyone knew what he meant by 'archived format'?

Thanks and sorry if this is dense of me!

' i need the files of the site because i do not want that after cusomization in the plugin, the site looks bad. So that's why i was thinking of working with actual site files so that during this process i wud be getting an idea, how the plugin wud look and work wen integrated actually in the site. For this i have copied the files to the folder site_backup which is located in parallel of wp-contents folder, but in order to download it wat i need is the archived format of that folder, but since the server didn;t have any such option, i m not able to download archived copy of the files.'