RAR FILE FORMAT

1. What is a RAR file

RAR is the native format of WinRAR archiver. Like other archives, RAR files are data containers, they store one or several files in the compressed form. After you downloaded RAR file from Internet, you need to unpack its contents in order to use it.

2. How to handle RAR files

WinRAR provides the complete support for RAR files, so you may both create and unpack them. If you installed WinRAR on your computer and downloaded RAR file from Internet, you may double click on RAR file icon to open it in WinRAR, select all files, press "Extract To" button, enter a destination path and press "OK". Another way is to click on the RAR file in Explorer using the right mouse button. If you enabled "Shell integration" option when installing WinRAR, the file context menu will contain "Extract to ..." item.

Some RAR files can be parts of multi-volume sequences. In WinRAR you can split a huge archive to a few smaller files, which are called volumes. They may have extensions .rar (the first volume), .r00, .r01, ..., or .part1.rar (the first volume), .part2.rar, ..., etc. If you need to unpack volumes, place all them to the same folder and start extraction from the first volume.

3. RAR versus ZIP

Comparing to ZIP file format, RAR provides a number of advanced features: more convenient multipart (multivolume) archives, tight compression including special solid, multimedia and text modes, strong AES-128 encryption, recovery records helping to repair an archive even in case of physical data damage, Unicode support to process non-English file names and a lot more.

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ZIP FILE FORMAT

1. What is a ZIP file

ZIP is a popular archive format widely using in Internet. Like other archives, ZIP files are data containers, they store one or several files in the compressed form. After you downloaded ZIP file, you need to unpack its contents in order to use it.

2. How to handle ZIP files

WinRAR provides the complete support for ZIP files, so you may both create and unpack them. If you installed WinRAR on your computer and downloaded ZIP file from Internet, you may double click on ZIP file icon to open it in WinRAR, select all files, press "Extract To" button, enter a destination path and press "OK". Another way is to click on the ZIP file in Explorer using the right mouse button. If you enabled "Shell integration" option when installing WinRAR, the file context menu will contain "Extract to ..." item. 

 

 

3. ZIP versus RAR

The main advantage of ZIP format is its popularity. ZIP file format was developed a long time ago and perhaps it is still the most known archive type, so a large part of Internet archives are ZIP files. But many important RAR format features (recovery records, Unicode names, strong AES encryption, etc.) are missing in ZIP. RAR archives usually provide a noticeably higher compression ratio than ZIP file format. 

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