7 ms·
Do people still use WinRar? :O
by black3r 6y ago
Do people still use WinRar? :O
- Arnavion 6y agoYes. People who don't know any better alternatives continue to use it, and continue to recommend it to other people. So the cycle continues. Heck, WinZip still makes new releases so I'm sure people still use that too.
- AlexandrB 6y ago> People who don't know any better alternatives continue to use it Genuine question: what are the better alternatives?
- geogra4 6y ago7zip
- Semaphor 6y agoI haven’t used WinRAR in ages, but what makes 7zip (which I use as well) better?
- greatgib 6y ago7zip is completely free and OpenSource, and more modern. I think that they also support more archive formats and they even have their own open format 7z. Based on their own claims, there are also faster and more efficient than Winrar.
- moogly 6y agoDon't know about modern. Isn't the developer (Igor?) (in)famously against anything invented after 1998?
- olvy0 6y agoIt can extract files to paths of more than 260 characters, without any extra tools or registry hacks, on any version of windows (even xp). Winrar cannot. As a bonus, 7zip can also delete folders with file paths that are over 260 characters from its file manager ui. It has been one of the only programs to be able to do so for many years.
- Seanambers 6y agoAmount of times this has been an issue with using Winrar for 15+ years : zero. I'm amazed at all the comments calling for 7zip as the one and only. winrar works just fine so does windows zip function. If you have an edge case, yeah then you need something that can handle it.
- olvy0 6y agoFWIW I agree with you, personally I also prefer Winrar, and have used it for many years with zero issues. I like its ui better than 7zip's. But the 260 chars is the one edge case that happened to be important to me and so I decided to switch.
- olyjohn 6y agoWinRAR works fine. But it's $29. 7zip works fine and is not $29.
- xfer 6y ago> paths of more than 260 characters This is the biggest joke of win32 system, how on earth after so many decades of breaking things this is still default?
- KiwiJohnno 6y agoTo be clear, this is a limitation in some of the very old Win32 APIs, not the kernel itself or the filesystem. The size of the field in these APIs is a fixed maximum length and can't be changed, because that would break everything. If an app called into the kernel and got a string longer than 260 chars back, then boom, instant buffer overflow. There are other, newer Win32 APIs for all of these that don't have that limitation, but apps have to be changed to use them.
- breakfastduck 6y agoYep, +1 for 7zip
- PrimeDirective 6y ago7zip (the archive manager, not the compression format), at least for Windows
- theandrewbailey 6y agoPeazip: https://peazip.github.io/ https://peazip.github.io/ I used to use 7zip, but switched when I discovered that Peazip doesn't extract to a temporary directory when extracting (thus, saving extra I/O work). It directly extracts into the target directory.
- WayToDoor 6y agoIs a file move that big of an IO operation?
- vore 6y agoI run into the issue sometimes cross-volume, where the file gets extracted into a temporary directory then has to be copied to the actual destination, into e.g. a network volume or second hard disk.
- theandrewbailey 6y agoBack when I used Winzip/7zip, they didn't move files: they copied files. When you're working with files measured in gigabytes, the speedup is quite noticeable.
- iMerNibor 6y agoIf it's moving it to a different drive/partition it'll have to copy it again Moving many (small) files can also be quite slow
- sumtechguy 6y agodepends on the move operation. 1 file you would not notice it. Thousands it would add up. Across 2 physical drives you may also notice it if the file is big enough.
- jasperry 6y agoIn response to WayToDoor, some archives contain thousands of files, and it's essentially doubling the number of filesystem operations by putting them in a temp directory and then moving. If the temp directory is on a different drive from the destination, then it's recopying all the data. I thought the creation of the files in the temp directory was an unavoidable artifact of how drag-and-drop worked in Windows. If peazip can get around this, I might check it out.
- saxonww 6y agoFor zip files in particular, you can just right click and 'Extract all' in modern versions of Windows. I believe you can also double-click to open them like folders in Explorer. 7-Zip covers the majority of other formats you're likely to encounter.
- pbalau 6y agoTotalCommander.
- mrweasel 6y agoOr maybe their customers just like the product, as in the GUI and feature and don’t care that another compression algorithm can shave off a few extra megabytes. If I recall correctly WinRAR can make self extracting archives pretty easily. If you use that feature it might be easier/better to just continue using WinRAR. I love the fact that small software companies like RARLAB can still exist.
- theandrewbailey 6y agoWinRAR seems to have added additional compression formats and algorithms, like 7zip and XZ: https://www.rarlab.com/otherfmt.htm https://www.rarlab.com/otherfmt.htm WinZIP, too: https://www.winzip.com/win/en/lanall.html https://www.winzip.com/win/en/lanall.html
- dependenttypes 6y ago> WinRAR seems to have added additional compression formats and algorithms, like 7zip and XZ: https://www.rarlab.com/otherfmt.htm https://www.rarlab.com/otherfmt.htm For decompression only. 7zip can work with these too. In fact 7zip (unlike winrar) can even create some of them.
- breakfastduck 6y agoIt would be incredibly sad to see them go out of business, it's such an iconic piece of software.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago> It would be incredibly sad to see them go out of business, it's such an iconic piece of software. Granted, it's also famous for (supposedly) nobody ever paying for it, which doesn't exactly lend itself to staying in business.
- breakfastduck 6y agoThat's true, but considering how widespread the software is, it's likely that they only need a tiny percentage of the overall user-base to pay to remain a sustainable business. They could at any point have changed the software to prevent it from functioning after the trial has expired - they're not going to be so naive to think people will all pay just because of a prompt that can be easily dismissed.
- wheybags 6y agoI have found that some multipart rar files fail to extract properly with 7zip. Most are fine though, but I normally have the unrar-nonfree package installed for the few that don't work.
- XzetaU8 6y agoHad a similar issue with some rar files but the latest v20.02 seems to have solved it and everything work fine so far, also if you want try to report this issue on their forum. https://sourceforge.net/p/sevenzip/discussion/45797/thread/9dbfea1e30/ https://sourceforge.net/p/sevenzip/discussion/45797/thread/9...
- tclancy 6y agoHang on, should I be moving off of pkzip?
- hinkley 6y agoSomehow archival tools have become political. 7zip seems to be the new one people use even though that means their users now have to download and understand two packages instead of one. It’s off-putting, especially when downloading your tool was already an act of yak shaving. As awesome as we want to think our tools are, the people who use them may be preoccupied with other problems instead. Friction will not convert them. I think I shamed someone out of using 7z recently by pointing out that if they claim to be trying to attract a broad audience of hobbyist developers, using a compression library that doesn’t exist on OS X (with out without Xcode) is not a smart plan. In this particular case you had to download two tools to use their code, and that just tore it for me. When I went back recently they had switched to .xz, which does exist.
- vbezhenar 6y agoWhat is better alternative? 7-zip UI is not as good and missing some WinRAR features.
- MikusR 6y agoThere are alternatives with built in recovery records? Which ones? I am being serious.
- mmebane 6y agoThat's the single remaining killer feature of RAR for me. I think the last time I actually used it was years ago when pulling a backup off of a degraded DVD-R, but it still provides a bit of peace of mind for long-term storage.
- account42 6y agoAny reason you can't use external PAR2 files? [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive
- MikusR 6y agoIt's the same thing as comparing Dropbox to an FTP server and Rsync. You can use it, it can be more powerful, but the unified experience is more convenient.
- edgarvaldes 6y agoI have used both and prefer the WinRar GUI and the better multi part support.
- Stevvo 6y agoWinRAR does everything you ask of it; compress or decompress archives in one click. Why wouldn't people still use it?
- spoopyskelly 6y agoBecause every operating system has built in zip compression support.
- Karunamon 6y agozip is hardly the only compression algorithm, or the best one for all conceivable use cases, and tools like Winrar (and 7zip, for that matter) offer additional features that the OS tools do not.
- parliament32 6y agoWinRAR is for RAR files, as the name suggests.
- jug 6y agoI do use 7-zip myself, but WinRAR has still a more feature rich user interface out of the box than 7-zip and while 7-zip has better compression in general, compression isn't everything when they're this close to each other, like a few percents different ratio.
- pletnes 6y agoI ask the same. It also has bugs where a zip/unzip roundtrip yields a different file. Not good.
- inetsee 6y agoEbooks available on IRC are often compressed as RAR files. More often lately Epub books are not being compressed since Epub files are already compressed, and compressing them again as RAR files doesn't really gain you anything.