Don't Use RAR

RAR is a full-blown backup format* while 7zip is &quot;just&quot; an archive format. So comparisons are somewhat mood.<p>But even I as a RAR fan and license holder have to agree. For the average joe, sending email attachments, zip or 7z is enough.<p>* It can safe all three file timestamps (From nanoseconds precision (with NTFS), down to only 2 seconds precision (if you want to shave of a view bytes)), ACLs, ADS, Hard and Soft Links, Unix devices. It can add restore data to protect from bit rot. It deduplicates identical files. Variable length part-files. Skips already compressed files. etc. etc. (+ the GUI supports settings-profiles, which i really miss in 7zip.)

The rar license prohibits writing a compatible compressor? What kind of nonsense is that? I clicked the license link and there is a scary looking anti-reverse-engineering clause, but 1) that sounds legally dubious given how the program is distributed; and 2) there is a FOSS decompressor, and studying that may be sufficient to write a compressor without examining the non-free official compressor.<p>The article is right that there&#x27;s not much good reason to use rar these days. It is still popular in some communities though. So I&#x27;ve had occasion to run the decompressor, though not the compressor as far as I can remember.

I strongly prefer WinRAR (the software) because it does everything I am looking for in an archiving and compressing software.<p>- It is a great tool for archiving. Especially in Windows, it is often faster to compress a rar archive than copying several hundreds of files. This fills the lack of a `tar` tool in Windows space.<p>- It supports changing the compression level during the compression.<p>- Highly backwards compatible format. The newer rar format is opt-in.<p>- WinRAR supports various formats such as ISO, JAR, and a few typical zip-ish formats.<p>- Superior drag and drop support.<p>- Context-aware extraction. For example, if you double click a PNG, it only extracts that PNG file. For an exe, it extracts the whole thing.<p>- Splitting files, locked archives, AES protection, SFX, and other features are easily accessible.<p>I use 7-zip for zstd, and brotli cli when I particularly need those formats. For my personal archives, rar format and WinRAR never let me down.<p>Yes, I get that it&#x27;s not an open source software and doesn&#x27;t come with a permissive license, but neither do Windows OS itself, and many other software I use. There is an open source unrar, so I don&#x27;t fear being locked out on my archived.<p>I happily paid the $29 even though I could absolutely use it without paying a dime, just like thousands of other users.

This is conflating archive format with compression algorithm.<p>The very broad statement &quot;7-Zip achieves a better compression ratio, but it is much slower to compress than RAR&quot; should be demonstrated over all compression levels with a curve of compression-ratio vs time. I am skeptical RAR cannot be outperformed by 7zip in at least some situations.<p>The license is the strongest argument to not use RAR.

Good luck trying to send a file compressed with Zstd or Brotli to people and have them know what to do with them. I’d certainly have to google to figure out how to open one of those. And I’m an engineer and aware that those formats exist.

There was a time when RAR was extremely popular because it dealt very well with splitting things across multiple diskette-sized archives, and because it edged out PKZIP in compression.<p>Regardless of its origins and... &quot;traditional&quot; use, these days it has zero relevance given that Windows and MacOS (as well as some Linux file managers) allow you to handle zip files without any additional software - and also because many file formats have evolved to support built-in compression.<p>I do find it extremely annoying, though, when I have to help someone rifle through old backups and need to expand a RAR archive, or when someone (for whatever reason) decides to package downloads in that way (the last culprit I remember was a Chinese company who packaged their MCU tooling that way).

&gt; There is an unofficial unrar that is free and open-source software, but there is no free and open-source rar as creating one is prohibited by the RAR license.<p>From the license (EULA), I assume this is the relevant part:<p>&gt; You may not use, copy, emulate, clone, rent, lease, sell, modify, decompile, disassemble, otherwise reverse engineer, or transfer the licensed software, or any subset of the licensed software, except as provided for in this agreement. Any such unauthorized use shall result in immediate and automatic termination of this license and may result in criminal and&#x2F;or civil prosecution.<p>&gt; Neither RAR binary code, WinRAR binary code, UnRAR source or UnRAR binary code may be used or reverse engineered to re-create the RAR compression algorithm, which is proprietary, without written permission.<p>&gt; The software may be using components developed and&#x2F;or copyrighted by third parties. Please read &quot;Acknowledgments&quot; help file topic for WinRAR or acknow.txt text file for other RAR versions for details.<p>Is this actually enforceable? If yes, are there worse outcomes apart from revoking the license? And I mean, the open source unrar, which is supposedly fine, doesn&#x27;t come with an EULA like this. So it&#x27;s probably not binding for reverse engineering based on the open source unrar.<p>edit: I mean if there is a separate patent, then it&#x27;s a different issue.

Does anyone know why RAR is better compression-wise than the two more modern standards?<p>It doesn&#x27;t seem like it&#x27;s been updated in a long time, and I would have expected modern software from two of the best houses in the world to handily beat it. Is it that good, or is it a matter of priorities, or something else?

This is pretty light on substance, essentially it and the post it points to says: it’s not a free license and there are better alternatives.<p>The post it links to saying they don’t want people to use free commercial software seems odd, I’m not sure I get it. The author thinks people won’t buy his software because WinRAR’s trial doesn’t expire?

I haven&#x27;t came accross a single rar file for years. Last was when I was a teenager in the mid&#x2F;late 90&#x27;s downloading pirated games&#x2F;app.

I&#x27;ve only seen the use of .rar in scene related materials. And even there it&#x27;s not used as frequently anymore.

For my brothers birthday one year I bought him a license for RAR

RAR reminds me very much of Limewire&#x2F;eMule&#x2F;Kazaa days.

Ive been a user of 7-zip for years. I&#x27;ve recently switched to NanaZip which is a fork which works with windows 11 new context menu and adds in some other niceties. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;M2Team&#x2F;NanaZip" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;M2Team&#x2F;NanaZip</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;peazip.github.io&#x2F;peazip-compression-benchmark.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;peazip.github.io&#x2F;peazip-compression-benchmark.html</a> Can’t beat zip’s availability even though it is quite slow… zstd compress&#x2F;extract speed seems to be the best overall.

The sightly better file compression with rar is still interesting. But I suppose with today&#x27;s compute when you think about the time vs space trade-off, time is more important. Space is cheap.

Interesting that the warez scene adopted RAR as the standard for packaging up pirated works. The alternatives like 7z save more bytes, yet RAR somehow became the winner. Anyone know why?

I’m not fully convinced of my own position here, but I have long suspected that “zipping” at all is an abstraction that shouldn’t really be exposed to the user. Like it’s a throwback to an earlier era.<p>The basic trade off is size for speed, and it seems like most cases it could handled automatically at the level of the file system maybe. Like if I have a big file that I want to send, it sort of feels like the software I use to send it should do the work of preparing it for transport to the target system. Similarly, if there are files that aren’t being touched very often shouldn’t the file system figure out that file can be in “small, slow” mode? Or maybe if I know a particular file should be always fast or always small, I should have the option in the file properties for it to be Automatic, Always Small, or Always Fast, like a toggle right near the permissions controls. But not like a separate program that generates separate, smaller, slower files of a special type. Why can’t folders be automatically treated like singular archives when I try to do operations on them for which that makes sense? Why do I have to think about these details?<p>I’m probably missing some important use cases and archiving features, but maybe those can be broken out from the default of “do the obvious thing automatically.”

I tried Peazip for Linux but it didn&#x27;t quite work for me. I remember it as kinda buggy, and anyhow, it works like a Gui wrapper that uses external console binaries to perform actual compression&#x2F;decompression tasks rather than having the routines built-in.<p>Regarding zstd: I would love to use it cross-platform, but zstd for Windows is still kinda exotic, and yes, it misses proper Gui applications. Now, if Winrar would support zstd... :P :P

I typically don&#x27;t make use of standard archive formats these days for my own file storage. If I want just pure maximum compression, I&#x27;ll often use a long-range matcher like FreeArc&#x27;s srep [1] or lrzip [2] combined with either fast-lzma2 [3] using a p7zip fork [4] for multithreading and fast compression or use mcm [5] or zpaq for max ratio with longer compression time.<p>However, my truly preferred way is using dwarfs [6], which features some really good deduplication and (by default) zstd compression while being mountable. Most of my files are highly compressed and easily accessible without needing to full decompress them. I even made a small script to convert and create AppImages that instead use this [7]. Admittedly, I don&#x27;t make use of PAR2 or anything of the sort, but I could just do that the traditional way if I so wished.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Phantop&#x2F;srep" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Phantop&#x2F;srep</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ckolivas&#x2F;lrzip" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ckolivas&#x2F;lrzip</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;conor42&#x2F;fast-lzma2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;conor42&#x2F;fast-lzma2</a><p>[4]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jinfeihan57&#x2F;p7zip" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jinfeihan57&#x2F;p7zip</a><p>[5]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mathieuchartier&#x2F;mcm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mathieuchartier&#x2F;mcm</a><p>[6]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mhx&#x2F;dwarfs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mhx&#x2F;dwarfs&#x2F;</a><p>[7]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Phantop&#x2F;appdwarf&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Phantop&#x2F;appdwarf&#x2F;</a>

The worst part of rar (and zip) is that they don&#x27;t specify filename encoding so you&#x27;ll end up with a encoding hell.

I have not used or even opened a .rar archive in probably 10 years. I am absolutely surprised about the amount of comments of people actively using it or even saying anything good about WinRAR. Wow. Disclaimer: I use Windows and Linux daily.

<i>All things considered, there are no reasons left to use RAR.</i><p>I sometimes run into RAR files that 7zip thinks are corrupt but WinRAR opens just fine. That by itself means I keep it installed. It doesn&#x27;t hurt that the GUI is more pleasant.

For all of my compression needs, i usually go for 7-Zip for longer term storage (since while it is noticeably slower than the alternatives, the ratios can be really good for formats that compress well, e.g. anything other than images or videos).<p>I also use ZIP for when i need good compatibility and relatively fast compression (since zip&#x2F;unzip are easy to use as far as CLIs got and 7-Zip also supports the format, as does whatever my *nix distro at the choice has for a GUI compression program).<p>I sometimes use tar with GZip for when i just want to temporarily compress something to move between servers without worrying about file permissions etc.

I have never by choice used rar &#x2F;or&#x2F; 7z. I&#x27;m not a heavy user of compression, just the occasional &quot;compress for transport&quot;, so to me any savings in file size is an unnoticable rounding error, even 15 years ago. Far more important to me is the simplicity of having tools for compression&#x2F;decompression built into pretty much any computer that might receive my file, and where the receiver of the file, who may not be technologically adept, knows what it is without me having to explain that it is a compressed file and they neeed to get some tool to decompress it.

Don&#x27;t use xz or 7-zip...use lzip:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nongnu.org&#x2F;lzip&#x2F;safety_of_the_lzip_format.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nongnu.org&#x2F;lzip&#x2F;safety_of_the_lzip_format.html</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nongnu.org&#x2F;lzip&#x2F;manual&#x2F;lzip_manual.html#Quality-assurance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nongnu.org&#x2F;lzip&#x2F;manual&#x2F;lzip_manual.html#Quality-...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nongnu.org&#x2F;lzip&#x2F;xz_inadequate.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nongnu.org&#x2F;lzip&#x2F;xz_inadequate.html</a>

I used RAR all the time in late 1990s-early 00s. It had great usability, great FAR Manager integration - unsurprising since they both were created by the same person, Eugene Roshal (incidentally, he was studying a few years earlier on the same faculty &#x2F; specialty as I).<p>But when I switched to GNU&#x2F;Linux, the reasons to use RAR died quietly. It had a good run, but didn&#x27;t get the widespread platform support it needed to succeed as an archive standard. It being a proprietary product didn&#x27;t help in that, I guess.

I&#x27;ve used winRAR for a long time because of the &quot;self-extracting executable&quot; feature. You can set it up to create an exe (instead of a rar) that extracts files to a particular location and then runs arbitrary commands. It&#x27;s like a super simple ghetto-fabulous installer and it just works.<p>Now I wonder what else can do that as easily in a windows environment? I haven&#x27;t looked around because I haven&#x27;t needed to but now I am curious. And yes, the winRAR UI is getting a bit long in the tooth.

&quot;Furthermore, the small differences in the resulting file size matter less over time as bandwidth is increasing and increasing fast.&quot;<p>Firstly, this argument, if true, would add up to: if you&#x27;re on Windows, don&#x27;t use <i>anything</i> other than ZIP.<p>The argument is not true, because although increasing storage and communication resources make compression less relevant for small files, there is content which is getting larger because of available bandwidth, including aggregations of smaller content.

There is open source support for RAR in unar:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theunarchiver.com&#x2F;command-line" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theunarchiver.com&#x2F;command-line</a>

One benefit of RAR is when dealing with multi-file archives, you don&#x27;t need all of the files to be able to decompress one of them. You don&#x27;t even need a complete file to be able to look inside!<p>Yes, some of your files will be broken if you don&#x27;t have the entire archive, but at least you can salvage some of your data. Or you can peek in to make sure you&#x27;ve got the right thing before committing to multi-gigabyte downloads.

If you&#x27;re using compression, and you have more than one core, you should consider trying pbzip2 - it&#x27;s parallel <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;compression.ca&#x2F;pbzip2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;compression.ca&#x2F;pbzip2&#x2F;</a><p>7zip may also do something similar, but it may depend on the archive type it&#x27;s creating.

FWIW libarchive and its commandline tool bsdtar, which are widely available and often installed by default on Linux hosts, is able to unpack most rar files.<p>Other than that I agree with the post, but if you have a rar file and need to unpack it that&#x27;s often good to know.

I was hoping this would be about OAuth 2.0 Rich Authorization Requests[1]!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datatracker.ietf.org&#x2F;doc&#x2F;html&#x2F;draft-ietf-oauth-rar" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datatracker.ietf.org&#x2F;doc&#x2F;html&#x2F;draft-ietf-oauth-rar</a>

PeaZip (the GUI app linked in the article) <i>does</i> support [ARJ](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30466484" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30466484</a>)...

Here I thought it was going to be because the RAR tools are all still single threaded and get their pants blown off by anything that can spread the work across the cores on any modern chip.

The main feature from WinRAR I don&#x27;t see in other GUIs is the ability to search within file contents (text) inside archives.

on a related note, Keka is a good (and free) gui tool for mac that supports wide array of archiving formats.

I&#x27;m eagerly awaiting a technological breakthrough in storage that renders compression pointless.

Meanwhile, I keep saving the WinRK installer from my antivirus software.

Haven&#x27;t use RAR in ages, i asume was not a popular format anymore.

The argument on increasing bandwidths is evil.

Oh the irony of recommending formats made by Google and Facebook - two of the largest enemies of the internet.

the only remaining usecase for rar are warez FTP&#x27;s

WinRar at least is a much better UI than 7-Zip.

Don&#x27;t listen to peasants, use RAR

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kuba--&#x2F;zip" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kuba--&#x2F;zip</a>

If you have half decent internet connection, Compressing and Decompressing the files is going to take more time than simply just sending it or downloading it.<p>I still remember we use to compare compression tools and format on compression ratio. But I cant record the last time I care about any of these any more. If it needs to compress just use zip. The same happened to Audio Codec as well.<p>Video Codec is where we still have lots of work.<p>And it is sort of strange RAR comes up, something we used to use everyday and is now for most people completely forgotten.