What is WINRAR?

WINRAR is 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.

Isn't WINRAR the same as WINZIP? Why would I need it ?

Winrar can do everything that winzip can do and much, much more. In fact winrar can happily read and write zip files if you require it to.

Features of RAR archives over zips include the following:

In most cases RAR format provides significantly better compression than ZIP, especially in the solid mode. Another important RAR feature is support of multi-volume archives. They are more convenient and easier to use than so called ZIP "span disks" archives. WinRAR does not support ZIP disks spanning. If you need to create a multi-volume set, use RAR volumes instead.

RAR format has also a few important features missing in ZIP, such as the recovery record allowing to reconstruct damaged data and locking of important archives to prevent their accidental modification.

RAR format is able to handle files of practically unlimited size (up to 8,589,934,591 GB), when the maximum size of a single file in a ZIP archive is 2 GB. Note that older file systems do not support files larger than 4 GB and you will need to use NTFS to work with such files.
You may be wondering why you would still want to bother with zip files at all once you have winrar. Here are a couple of reasons:

The main advantage of ZIP format is its popularity. For example, most archives on the Internet are ZIP archives. So if you are going to send an archive to somebody, but you are not sure that your addressee has WinRAR to extract the contents of the archive, it might be a good idea to use the ZIP format. On the other hand, you may send a self-extracting archive. Such archives are slightly larger, but can be extracted without external programs.

Another ZIP advantage is speed. ZIP archives are usually created faster than RAR.

Do I have to pay for WINRAR?

WINRAR is shareware, which means you can try it out absolutely free for 40 days. If you like it you can buy it. You'll be surprised what great value for money it is.

For your free official WINRAR trial download click here


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