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Why RAR Is Better Than ZIP & The Best RAR Software Available

Justin Pot — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 19:01:32 +0000

RAR files are smaller, easier to split and easier to recover than ZIP files. These three features mean RAR files are better than ZIP, even though ZIP files are far more common.

If you use the Internet often then, in all likelihood, you’ve more than once downloaded a ZIP file. A ZIP is basically a compressed folder you can download as a single file. A lot of free software is offered in ZIP files. Use the Internet a little longer, though, and you will stumble upon a few RAR files. A RAR is, in many ways, similar to a ZIP. It is a single file containing multiple files, but unlike ZIP files you need special software to open RAR files.

Why doesn’t everyone just use ZIP? Well, because in many ways RAR is better than ZIP.

RAR Is Awesome Because…

The main reason people use RAR is because of the compression rate. Overall, RAR files are smaller than ZIP files, meaning they don’t take as long to upload or download.

Don’t believe me? Check out these ZIP versus RAR tests. You’ll notice higher compression in general, particularly for media files.

The lower the percentage, the better the compression.

Another nice thing about RAR files is that they can be split into multiple pieces. What does this mean? Well, you could split a large file into two or more different RAR files. This is handy if you need to store a very large file on CDs or other small disks.

WinRAR also supports the creation of recovery files, which are very handy in the event of a failing hard drive. To take advantage of this, all you need is to create a .REV file when you’re compressing. If (God forbid) something goes wrong this will increase the chances of you recovering your compressed information.

ZIP Is Still A Good Idea When…

ZIP still beats RAR in one key way, though. ZIP works, by default, on pretty much any computer on earth. Windows, Mac and Linux all support ZIP out of the box, meaning you you can send a ZIP file to a friend who doesn’t know much about computers and he will still be able to open it. Send that friend a RAR file though, and you might end up providing technical support over the phone.

Software For Opening & Creating RAR Files

Want to get started with RAR files? Here’s the best software for the job.

If you’re a Windows user, WinRAR is probably the first program you should check out. I can create and open RAR files, but be warned, it isn’t free. There’s a trial, but after that you need to pay $30 to keep using the software.

WinRAR only works for Windows, but don’t worry, you can download the command line-only program RAR to run on Mac and Linux. It can create and open RAR files, but like WinRAR, it is not free.

Looking for something free? Check out 7ZIP, which supports a number of formats including RAR. Be aware though that it can open, but not create, RAR files.

If 7Zip isn’t to your tastes, check out PeaZip, a great alternative to WinRAR and WinZip. Again, sadly, it cannot create RAR files, only open them. It features an easy user interface:

Both those programs work best for Windows and Linux. Want something for Mac? The Unarchiver is a replacement for the built-in Mac unzipping program, and supports opening RAR files. Again, creating RAR files is not supported – you need to use the official RAR program for that.

Find more WinRAR alternatives on MakeUseOf Answers.

Conclusion

Which format to use is obviously up to you, but now you know why RAR is better than ZIP and what the best RAR software available is.

Do you disagree with me? Let me know why below. Also feel free to pitch in with alternatives programs for creating and opening RAR files, because I know I can learn from you.

PeaZip – A Fantastic Free Alternative To WinRAR Or WinZip

Justin Pot — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 19:31:49 +0000

Open almost any archive file, quickly, from a familiar interface. That’s the promise of PeaZip, an open source file extraction program for Windows and Linux, and it delivers.

You might think there’s no free extraction program out there that can match 7zip, a great program for unzipping uncommon archive formats. PeaZip does. It supports extraction from 126 different archive types, includes drag-and-drop extraction and can convert one type of archive to another. Heck, it can even open Apple’s .DMG files in Windows or Linux.

PeaZip does all this with an interface users of commercial products like WinRAR or WinZIP will find completely familiar.

Basic Usage

Fire up PeaZip and you’ll see what looks like a file browser. It’s when you open a file that things become interesting. Here’s me taking a look at an ISO:

Nothing too exciting, of course, but if I start dragging a file I get this helpful popup:

This is fantastic if you want to very quickly extract a certain file. If you want to extract everything from a given file that’s easy too: just press the big “extract” button.

PeaZip supports an insane number of archive types, which is nice. What I like is that Mac’s .DMG archive is supported, giving Linux and Windows users a way to open these files. Here’s me looking at the contents of the iLife ’09 DVD:

This just might come in handy for you, if you’re the sort of person who works on multiple platforms.

Sometimes you don’t want to simply extract information; you want to convert one sort of archive file (RAR) to one your less tech-savvy friends are more likely to be able to open (ZIP). Not a problem. Just click the “Convert” button after highlighting a given archive:

You’ll only be able to convert files to formats PeaZip supports creating, of course, so keep reading for that list. But this feature is a very useful way to make any archive cross-platform and easy to share.

Supported File Types

126 formats is a big claim, but PeaZip backs this claim up on their website. Of course, many of these formats can only be opened by PeaZip; a few can be created by the program as well. Here is, from the PeaZip website, a rundown of what formats the application can work with:

Creation: 7z, FreeArc’s arc/wrc, sfx (7z and arc), bz2, gz, paq/lpaq/zpaq, pea, quad/balz, split, tar, upx, zip

Opening: 7z, bz, bz2, bzip2, tbz2, tbz, gz, gzip, tgz, tpz, tar, zip, z01, smzip, arj, cab, chm, chi, chq, chw, hxs, hxi, hxr, hxq, hxw, lit, cpio, deb, lzh, lha, rar, r01, 00, rpm, z, taz, tz, iso, jar, ear, war, lha, pet, pup, pak, pk3, pk4, slp, xpi, wim, u3p, lzma86, lzma, udf, xar, dmg, hfs, part1, split, swm, tpz, kmz, xz, txz, vhd, mslz, apm, mbr, fat, ntfs, exe, dll, sys, msi, msp, ods, ots, odm, oth, oxt, odb, odf, odg, otg, odp, otp, odt, ott, gnm, doc, dot, xls, xlt, ppt, pps, pot, docx, dotx, xlsx, xltx, swf, flv, quad, balz, zpaq, paq8f, paq8jd, paq8l, paq8o, lpaq1, lpaq5, lpaq8, ace, arc, wrc, 001, pea, cbz, cbr, cba, cb7, cbt and more.

Be sure to check out PeaZip’s technical specifications if you want to learn more about the program and how it works.

Download

Ready to start using PeaZip? Awesome. Just head over to PeaZip’s website to find installation instructions for Windows and Linux. You’ll even find a portable version of PeaZip for both Windows and Linux, meaning you can take file extraction with you just about everywhere.

PeaZip is, unusually, not in the Ubuntu repositories, so check the above link even if you’re used to using the repo for everything. Weird, I know, but you’ll find a nice .deb file for easy installation.

Like this program? Tell us why below. Also feel free to tell us what extraction program you like best, and why.

How To Split Files Into Manageable Chunks With Slices [Mac]

Jeffry Thurana — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:31:31 +0000

I still remember the days when 3.5″ floppy drives ruled the world. I used to bring two boxes of those 1.44MB drives to transfer files from the office to my home computer. Kids these days might not be able to imagine living with portable drives without the letters “GB” behind it. How could they? Even three minutes worth of good quality MP3 music will cost you more than 3MB of storage.

Anyway, the storage limitation in that era forced everybody to come up with the solution to put big-size files in to those miniscule capacity floppies. Maybe that need is the force which gave birth to the technology to split files.

How to Split Files – Divide and Conquer

Even today, the era when you can easily find elementary school students with a few gigabytes of USB drive inside their pencil case, file-splitting technology is still in demand. A few of the most common scenarios behind this necessity are: sending big files via email, burning over 700MB-size files onto CDs, copying the contents of a dual-layer DVD to single layer discs, uploading extremely large files to online storage that sets specific maximum sizes of each file, and much more. A lot of people want to know how to split files.

However, doing file splitting carries its own risks. If one of the parts is missing or damaged, it’s impossible to reconstruct everything back to its original form. The same thing goes for the existence of compatible splitter-joiner apps. Imagine downloading 21 parts of 100MB only to find that one of them is damaged, or to find that you don’t have the application that can join them.

But if you really need to do it, you can use one of the alternative file splitters in Mac: Slices.

Slicing The Fresh Orange

The user interface of this file splitter is plain simple. You’ll see a rectangular box with two main tabs: “Split” and “Combine” representing the two main functions of this app.

If you want to know how to split files, all you have to do is simply drag and drop the file to the dropping area called “drag file to split here” under the “Split” tab.

Then decide how big the maximum size of every file chunk should be. The options are any number in KB, MB or GB.

Before you click the “Split” button, go to the “Options” first. Here is the place to decide what splitting format that you want to use.

There’s “Split & Cat” with “Checksum” option and “7zip” with “Compress” option. Choose one of them, click “OK“, then continue on with the “Split” button and decide the place to save the chunks.

The process could take some time depending on the size of the original file and the maximum size of each individual chunk.

Reconstructing Details

Joining chunks of files is also as easy as drag and drop. Select the files and drag them to the “drag files to combine here” area under the “Combine” tab.

Hit the “Combine” button and decide the place to save the reconstructed file.

Please note that unlike RAR chunks, you cannot drag only one of the chunks to combine everything even though the other chunks are within the same folder. This is the only drawback that I could find. Hopefully the developer will improve this particular issue in a future release.

But in general, Slices is a solid application and can fit everyday needs of splitting files and re-joining the chunks.

Do you often need to split files? Do you know other file splitting app alternatives? Share your thoughts and opinions using the comments below. And don’t forget to check out our other file-splitting articles.

Image credit: oxtopus, joyosity

7Zip – A Free Program to Unzip Uncommon Archive Formats

Dean Sherwin — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:00:46 +0000

The other day I downloaded a .RAR file. I saw them here and there but to my surprise never extracted one in the past. I really needed the app which I found in Mark’s article here to take a screenshot of my cell phone for another article.

So I then did a little digging around on MakeUseOf for free unzip programs that support the format and stumbled upon a 7Zip, an open-source file compression/extraction program which supports a multitude of compression formats.

Although there is also a IZArc which MakeUseOf recently recommended in its 15 Must-Have Free Software Programs I still decided to go with 7zip. While both seem to be rather popular among techies, I went ahead with 7zip mainly for its high compression ratio.

7Zip – How To

So in this article I’m going to get down to basics and show you how to extract and compress files that aren’t of the common variety.

First, download and install the free unzip program, 7Zip, from here.

After it has installed, start up the program from ‘All Programs’ under the start menu. The home screen should look like the screenshot below.

Extraction

Your first step is to locate the file you want to extract.

Normally, after you install 7Zip it should automatically recognize supported archive formats and integrate extract options to Windows context menus. When you right click on the file, there should be a 7Zip option.

Clicking on one of the Extract options will extract the files form the archive.

Alternatively, you can just run 7Zip directly and open the archive from the program interface. You can either paste the file location into the text entry box or browse for it using the icons shown at the bottom part of the above screenshot. Once you have located your file, click on it once. This will highlight it. Then, press the minus sign ( – ) in the menu bar across the top. The window below will open.

Fill out the details below including where you want the extracted file to go and a password (if any). Then select ‘OK’. It shouldn’t take too long to extract and once it does your file will be ready and waiting for you beside the original compressed file provided you didn’t specify another output location.

Compression

Compression follows along much the same lines as extraction. Navigate to the file you want to compress within the 7Zip window and highlight it. Then click the plus sign (+) up in the top left hand corner. The window below will appear.

Enter in the information such as compression level, compression method and password. Then click ‘OK’. Now the compressed file will be beside the original file.

A bit more on compression. 7Zip offers a compression ratio that is about 10% better than WinZip. Moreover, by compressing a file into its native 7z format, you can achieve a compression ratio up to 70% higher than the zip format.

7Zip supports many other formats for extraction and compression. Some the main ones are listed here:

Extracting and Compressing: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
Extracting Only: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z.

To conclude, 7Zip will take care of most of your extracting/compression needs when your standard extractor isn’t up the the task. And unlike many of its competitors it’ll do the job for free!

The Top 3 File Compression & Extraction Softwares

Simon Slangen — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:00:40 +0000

Whether you’re tight on space, or need to send an enormous quantity of files, archiving software is the way to go. These days, not using an archiving suite is almost unthinkable, and it’s one of the first things you should download when you reinstall your operation system.

But which software is the way to go? In the sea of (free) software, which tool does its job best?

We decided to check it out, and present you the best free archiving applications on the market. Read on to see the best extraction program, the application with the tightest compression and the multi-platform topper.

Universal Extractor – Best Extraction Program

With over 50 supported file formats, Universal Extractor, or UniExtract, is the obvious winner when looking for extraction software. Whether you want to view the contents of a RAR file, an EXE, or even a dbx-file.

Universal Extractor uses an algorithm to determine the given filetype. Only if this does not yield any results does it resort to the filename, so you shouldn’t have any problems with wrongly named files.

You can use the File/Destination GUI as depicted in the first screenshot, or the right-click context menu to quickly extract all your files. Universal Extracter has a simple, superficial interface, and that’s good thing.

If you want to read more about Universal Extractor, Mark wrote a more extended article about it late 2007.

Universal Extractor is available for Windows 2000/XP/Vista

KGB Archiver – Tightest Compression

KGB Archiver is an application with an insane, perhaps even the all-time highest compression rate. To achieve this, KGB Archiver deploys its PAQ6, or more recently PAQ7 compression algorithm.

Tested with Calgary Corpus, a 6MB package famous for compression algorithm testing, KGB Archiver manages to reach a stunning compress ratio of 19.8%. Compare this to the maximum RAR compression (24.0%) and 7zip ultra compression (26.1%), and I think we’ve got ourselves a winner. More test results can be found here.

Although KGB Archiver is mostly just a compression tool (it can make KGB and ZIP files), it’s the perfect companion for Universal Extractor. Get the tightest compressions out of KGB Archiver, and decompress everything using Universal Extractor, even the previously made KGB files!

KGB Archiver is currently available for Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista

7-Zip – Multi Platform Topper

If this one were to be missing from the list, I’d probably get lynched. And for a good reason that is. Over the years 7-Zip has made quite a name for itself across, and although it doesn’t support as many files as Universal Extractor, or has a compression rate as high as KGB Archiver, it gets the job done.

This open-source application works under a simple interface, but hides a very advanced toolbox. It runs light on memory and, well, just feels clean.

7-Zip File Manager is available on Windows/Mac/Linux.

So what do you think? Perhaps you prefer IZArc, or TugZIP. Tell us which applications are on top of your list, and why.

Quick Zip File Compressor & Extractor (Free WinZip Alternative)

Joel Reyes — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 17:00:20 +0000

For quite some time now there haven’t been many free apps that could be said to rival or go up against the giant file zipping and compressing giant, WinZip. This is determined in the apps ability to compress or decompress files with substantial power and extraction speeds.

We believe we’ve found a completely free file compressor extractor app (alternative to WinZip) called ZipItFree.

Why ZipItFree?

Besides the fact that (as it states it in its name) this app is free there are no annoying and irritating registrations or fees to pay. As soon as you unzip a file you have full control of functions through a modern and stylish graphical user interface while also being able to enjoy the benefits of its speed as well.

Decompressing files is even easier (as it should be) then zipping them up. All you have to do is open your ZipItFree file and locate the extraction button and click it. Your extraction should instantly begin.

The method of file compression this app uses is many times referred to as the “Black Hole” by developers because of its extremely high compression ratios and mega-fast decompression.

Another reason this desktop app (compatible with Windows versions NT-Vista) can be placed at the top of fellow similar software is its ability to utilize ZipV2 encryption algorithms to archive contents within a zipped file. This has been classified as over 100 times more secure than AES encryption algorithms (used by several un-zipping apps).

Our Journey Ends

ZipItFree handles several different formats with ease and allows you to leave comments on your archives describing what that specific archive contains so that you don’t have to unzip every file every single time you may be searching for something.

A few things that could be fixed on this fairly new app would be the support of additional formats, for now ZipItFree can support a wide variation of files; however, it still does not support all formats. The only other con I came across is that although the encryption method is substantially strong, it still may not be enough for everyone. It would be a much stronger app if it were able to somehow allow app users to choose stronger and better encryption methods totally dependent on their needs.

Here are a few files that ZipItFree easily supports: ACE, ARC, BH, BZip, CAB, GZIP, JAR, LHA, RAR, TAR, UUE, XXE, ZIP, and Zoo.

What file compressor/extractor do you use? Let us know in comments.