Compression is something that many of us use quite often. Its become part and parcel of our daily life. How many times we have have zipped up our documents and sent it off via email. Not only does compression save space but also helps you put many files in a single file and send it.
Though many of us are familiar with WinZip, there are just a few who know WinRAR. WinRAR is a 32-bit Windows version of the RAR archiver - a powerful tool which allows you to create, manage and control archive files. There are several versions of RAR, for a number of operating environments: Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, DOS, OS/2, MacOS X.
To begin with, WinRAR’s main program, like is suggests is the RAR format. RAR usually provides a better compression ratio that the zip format. It is also known to be more stable less prone to corruption errors. A nice Rar vs ZIP is given in the WinRAR help file.
Quoting, ’’Additionally to complete support of RAR and ZIP WinRAR provides basic operations for CAB, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZ, ACE, UUE, BZ2, JAR and ISO (CD image) files created by other tools: view contents, extract files, show comments and archive information. You do not need to have any external programs to handle these formats.’’
Quoting again, ’’Regardless of the archive format the next step is selection of compression method. Six compression methods are supported: ’’Store’’, ’’Fastest’’, ’’Fast’’, ’’Normal’’, ’’Good’’ and ’’Best’’. The ’’Best’’ method provides highest, but slowest compression, ’’Fastest’’ compresses poorly, but is very fast, ’’Store’’ merges files into an archive without compression. If you create an archive for distribution or for long storage, probably you should ignore time and use the ’’Best’’ compression method to reduce the size as much as possible. But if you are creating your daily backup, ’’Normal’’ compression is usually the best choice.’’
Few other features are, Integration with windows shell, comman line, drag’n’drop, rar and zip repair, zip/rar and email, multi-volume archive. Also includes a console version.
Now for the cons
Limited support for archives other than zip and rar
I have noticed a small problem with msi files in zip archives, winrar opens it instead of running it.
The number of files, which can be added to an archive, depends upon the amount of available memory and the length of file names. Roughly 128 bytes of memory are required per archived file for RAR archive. For example, it is recommended to have 128 MB if you are going to archive million of files. WinRAR has been tested to handle over 1 million files.
The size of a RAR archive, as well as the size of any single file within a RAR archive, is limited to 8, 589, 934, 591 GB (9, 223, 372, 036, 854, 775, 807 bytes). Note that to create archives larger than 4 GB, you need to use NTFS, as older file systems do not support such large files.
The size of a ZIP archive, as well as the size of any single file within a ZIP archive, is limited to 2 GB.
Compression time is slower than winzip, even for zip archives
Shareware
Most of the problems above, are not something that would cause you to restrict using their software. So give it a try.
Where to get it?
https://rarlabs.com
My last words
Hope you find the review useful, it was rather exhaustive.