Why Go RAR?

09/01/2007

If you have been downloading files off the internet for a while, doubtlessly you have run into a RAR file. Many people have come to me asking what these files are, how to open them, and how to create them. This months featured software is WinRAR by RARLab. WinRAR is a powerful archiving software used by many people to create archived files. You might want to take a look, the results may have you packing up and leaving the ZIP camp behind.

What is a RAR file?

RARs are a proprietary archiving and compression format created by Eugene Roshal. To put this in simpler terms, its an alternative to the commonly used ZIP files. It offers a way for users to group large amounts of files together and compress them down to a smaller size for ease of downloading and transferring. They are the second most popular archive type on the web behind zip files and rapidly gaining on those as well. There is a very good reason why RAR files are so popular on the web these days. It all comes down to speed and size. WinRAR has better compression and takes less time to compress the same amount of data than WinZip. How much less time? Take a look at my test below.

WinZip vs WinRAR

I decided to pit WinRAR against the ever popular WinZip program and see how long it took to pack (bundle all the files together in one archive) a 2.2GB folder with roughly 700 files in it. The only thing I had running aside from the antivirus was Firefox with an online stopwatch page open. My computer is an Athlon 64 3700+ with 3GB of RAM. Starting with WinZip, I set the settings to their maximum compression, started the timer and turned it loose. 28 minutes and 45 seconds later, my zip file was complete and it had compressed my files from 2.2GB down to 769,613KB. I got a good 3 chapters finished in the book I was reading by the time this finally finished. However, it did manage to compress it down to about 1/3 the original size of the folder. After I closed down WinZip, I started up WinRAR under the same scenario. 15 minutes and 24 seconds later, WinRAR had completed the same archive. The final size was 766,276KB, roughly 3MB less than WinZip had managed to do in twice the time. I declared WinRAR the winner in this race if only on time saved alone.

The WinRar Interface

One of the things I like about WinRAR is that it is very easy to use. The interface for WinRAR consists of 6 menus, 7 large buttons, and a file list. These are all included here so that if a person wants to they can access anything they need for using a RAR file from one location. Realistically though, after 3 years of using this program, the only things I have ever used on the main interface on a regular basis are Extract To and Test.

Here is an overview of what each of the buttons does.

Add: This button brings up the RAR and Zip creation window. While this is a very useful screen, I have found that I do not normally access it from this button as it adds an extra step to get to it. One of the most important aspects about WinRAR is actually creating the archives. There are a couple different methods to create an archive. The first method is to open WinRAR and simply browse to the files you wish to archive, then clicking add. This will bring up the screen for defining all the information about your archive.

The second method is to just right click on the files or folders and select 'Add to Archive'. Both will bring up the same window. The first method is very useful for those of you who want to select individual files to add to the archive. The second method is good for taking large amounts of files in a single folder and archiving together quickly. There is a vast amount of things you can do with screen for adding files and folders to your archive. Among them include features such as security, compression levels, archive splitting, and sfx abilities (self extracting archives).

Extract To: The other one of the two most important parts of WinRAR. Like the Add feature, I have found that this button does not get used very much if you use WinRAR a lot as there are quicker ways to get into it without going the extra step. Clicking the Extract To button will bring you into a new window with several options and a file tree. You can either type the path of the location you would like to extract the file to, or for those of you are are less textually inclined, you can just navigate to the location you would like to extract the archive to in the file tree.

Besides just extracting your archives, you have other options on how you may want to extract them here as well. For instance if you are extracting into a location that contains a previous version of your archive, you can choose to just update the existing files from the archive, replace them completely, or only extract new (fresh) files to the archive. Additionally you can choose how WinRAR handles the files in an overwrite mode and how it handles broken files.

Test: This button allows you to do a test extraction of your RAR files without actually opening them. This feature gets used a lot when sending out password protected RAR files, as it allows you to test to make sure that you typed in the correct password when you were performing the RAR on the file, without actually having to extract the files. The other thing this is good for is checking for errors. Any errors that may be contained in the RAR file, such as a corrupt file, incorrect password, etc, will show up when you test the file.

View: This is a rather pointless button that allows you to view the file list of a RAR file. The reason why this is pointless is because you can get the same information by double clicking on the file in the WinRAR file list. You have to click once to select the file anyways, so it does not take too much more effort to click the file a second time. However, this was included to make life easier for those who are not as savvy with the computer as a quick and visible way of viewing the contents of a RAR file.

Delete: As you might suspect, this button deletes the file from your hard drive and sends it to your recycle bin.

Find: This is a tool that may not work as you expect it to. It does an exact match search for the files you are looking for. In order for it to work right, you have to either know the exact name of the file you are looking for or learn to use the wildcard character, in this case it is the star. Also on this tool you have to watch out to make sure that the Match case box is not selected as that will likely throw off your search.

Wizard: This is a rather slow and clumsy Wizard aimed to make it easier for you to unpack an archive, create a new archive, or add files to an existing archive. While obviously aimed at beginning computer users, it does an okay job at best. The interface that users have to use to choose a destination folder to extract their archives to, while pretty common, is terrible. Also the interface for creating a new archive is shaky at best. While it works, I have a feeling that a lot of people are going to be going back to the third option again and again since there is no visible option for adding multiple files to an archive. For those of you who know Windows, this can be achieved by holding down Ctrl and selecting the files and folders you want or holding down shift and selecting a block of files and folders you want. If you wish to have files from folders other than the one you have currently selected, you are out of luck with the wizard.

Info: This will give you advanced information on your files and folders. It gives you such information as the total amount of files included in a RAR, the compression ratio, the size, the ability to lock your archives and a few other things that most people will never use. Also on files and folders it will estimate the compression ratio, the size, and the amount of time it would take to compress the file or folder. This could come in handy for estimated time management on large files, but I do not know how much I would trust its actual judgment.

Repair: This will go into a RAR or Zip file and try to repair the contents of it and put them in a new RAR or Zip file. I personally was not able to get it to work on my test archive, but your mileage may vary with this. Who knows, it may work for you, but I would not hold my breath.


Other Things of Note

WinRAR changes your right click menu in Windows, giving you several new options depending on what type of file or folder you have right clicked on. Often this right click menu is the fastest and most efficient way to deal with data in WinRAR. Using this you can quickly choose the location of where you want to extract your files to, whether its to that direct location, a folder sharing the name of the archive, or a completely new location. Also you can use this right click feature to extract large amounts of archived files, each to their own folder or to the location of your choice. For instance I had 56 RAR files in a folder. Rather than selecting them and extracting them one by one, I just did a select all on them and extracted them each to their own individual folder, saving myself tons of time and clicks.

As mentioned earlier, you can also right click a file or folder and quickly add folders to an archive. From here you can name the archive, choose to have it autoname the archive, or do either of those options and have it emailed out directly from there as well. However, the functionality to email the archive out is severely limited depending on your email provider and how you access your email. Being that I am running my email directly through the web browser, this option is not functional for me.

WinRAR has creation support for RAR files and ZIP files, but you will find that if trying to create too large of zip files, WINRAR will give you an error. For sure 2GB is too big of a file for WINRAR to zip, but I do not know the exact upper limit of WinRAR's zipping capability. However, it will not have any problems creating a RAR file of that size or larger or unzipping zip files of that size. Additionally, WinRAR has unpacking support for 12 other formats besides RAR and zip. These include CAB, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZ, ACE, UUE, BZ2, JAR, ISO, 7z and Z archives. This gives WinRAR a well rounded capability for usefulness, basically supporting all of the common archive types. WinRAR also has cross platform support for 6 different platforms. While their graphical interface is only available in Windows and Pocket PC, it is available for Mac and Linux users as well in a command line interface.

Don't like the look of WinRAR? They provide several pages of themes so that you can change the look to something that may be a little closer to your liking.

Final Thoughts

It should be noted that WinRAR is not free software. If you use it, it is recommended that you purchase the software from RAR Labs and help support this great product. That said, WinRAR gives you a 40 day trial before it starts popping up a nag screen telling you to purchase the software, but the software continues to function without any issue even after the 40 day trial expires. RAR files are a sort of defacto standard on the internet. As one of the most commonly distributed files types out there, I find that that having this program installed on your computer is essential. Even the least computer savvy users I know have run into RAR files at least once. Although it has a massive amount of options for things you can do with this program, it provides a nice balance of ease of use and advanced features. I highly recommend that you get this program today and leave your zipping days behind.

Rating: 4.5/5


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