14 ms·

Don't Use RAR

209 points by vedranm 5y ago

thrower123 5y ago
WinRar at least is a much better UI than 7-Zip.
- Ygg2 5y ago
  That's debatable, 7zip UI is servicable.
causi 5y ago
All things considered, there are no reasons left to use RAR. I sometimes run into RAR files that 7zip thinks are corrupt but WinRAR opens just fine. That by itself means I keep it installed. It doesn't hurt that the GUI is more pleasant.
- lifthrasiir 5y ago
  I believe "us[ing] RAR" here means the creation of new RAR files. In fact your experience strikes me as another reason to actively avoid RAR; there is no guarantee that your RAR archive can be decompressed with third-party softwares other than WinRAR itself.
  - useFAR 5y ago
    >>In fact your experience strikes me as another reason to actively avoid RAR; This is only your reason. >>there is no guarantee that your RAR archive can be decompressed with third-party softwares other than WinRAR itself. I'm perfectly fine, that my personal files would not be opened by someone, who is actively avoiding RAR(in my personal use - after rar was lha, that I used for archiving, because no one else knew what was that). And if I am sending my files to someone, then they will sure know how to use RAR. What others will do with THEIR PERSONAL FILES - does not concern me at all - and should not concern author of article, that heavily mixes public and personal use of archivers. If some of the points might be applicable to public use - perhaps, but it is questionable, that opinion of blog writer can have any authority on this matter, where everyone will be doing what is best for them, so the actual true value(where it is only worth to "prove" others how you are right and other are not) of this high opinionated article is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - causi 5y ago
      Right. Because I'm a fan of not starving to death myself, I have no problem paying people for goods and services and hence don't agree with the "closed source is a sin" stance of the author. RAR is both faster and more pleasant to use on a daily basis than 7zip, so that's what I use for all my own files. If I'm going to host data or send it to someone who I know uses 7zip, then I'll use that. Generally though when I have a need to send compressed files I have no idea what the recipient has installed so I'm forced to use regular zip files.
sintapilgo 5y ago
The main feature from WinRAR I don't see in other GUIs is the ability to search within file contents (text) inside archives.
wink 5y ago
I have not used or even opened a .rar archive in probably 10 years. I am absolutely surprised about the amount of comments of people actively using it or even saying anything good about WinRAR. Wow. Disclaimer: I use Windows and Linux daily.
bullen 5y ago
https://github.com/kuba--/zip https://github.com/kuba--/zip
EdwardDiego 5y ago
RAR reminds me very much of Limewire/eMule/Kazaa days.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- agumonkey 5y ago
  to me it goes back to Doom days
  - anilakar 5y ago
    Nah, it was all about .arj then.
    - DocTomoe 5y ago
      Anyone remember .zoo? Those were the days...
      - EdwardDiego 5y ago
        I do now that you mentioned it. And there was an archive format starting with LZ* right? LZW? LZJ? I mainly hit that one when downloading .MOD music. (Edit, huh, .ZOO was based on LSW, so maybe I'm conflating the two)
        CRConrad 5y ago
        LZW sounds familiar, LZJ doesn't.
    - krige 5y ago
      powerpacker or bust, baby
    - EdwardDiego 5y ago
      Oh wow, ARJ, and of course, ARC. Now I want to dial up to a BBS with my fancy 14.4K modem and download WADs via ZMODEM.
hajhatten 5y ago
I've only seen the use of .rar in scene related materials. And even there it's not used as frequently anymore.
TomGullen 5y ago
For my brothers birthday one year I bought him a license for RAR
- smilespray 5y ago
  So you're the one who kept the company running!
- Aisen8010 5y ago
  I remember downloading a torrent of winrar compressed in rar when I was younger. That troll gave me a good laugh.
- ValentineC 5y ago
  Relevant subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PaidForWinRAR/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PaidForWinRAR/ :)
david_draco 5y ago
This is conflating archive format with compression algorithm. The very broad statement "7-Zip achieves a better compression ratio, but it is much slower to compress than RAR" should be demonstrated over all compression levels with a curve of compression-ratio vs time. I am skeptical RAR cannot be outperformed by 7zip in at least some situations. The license is the strongest argument to not use RAR.
- ihateolives 5y ago
  > The license is the strongest argument to not use RAR. Why? Most of the daily tools that keep business world running are closed source. Excel. Or Photoshop. Or Windows/MacOS itself. But RAR license and not being open source is now pushing it too far? Really?
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    Its okay to have some business spesific software be closed source, say Excell. But an archive is needed every time you download a collection of files from a government website, or make GDPR request for your data to google. So by choosing RAR you would be forcing millions of people, maybe entire country to use that company's product and giving them power. Is there any good reason for that?
    - vetinari 5y ago
      And what's the difference compared to forcing docx/xlsx or psd? The network effects affect every exchange, not just archives.
      - klez 5y ago
        docx/xslx are open formats. About psd, yes, that's proprietary. What government agency mandates its use for the public to interact with them? (genuinely asking, not being snarky)
        5y ago
darkhorn 5y ago
- rvz 5y ago
  and? Everyone is using nginx and that was made by a Russian, does that mean we should stop using it? This is why 'guilt by association' doesn't work with your 'point'.
  - ismayilzadan 5y ago
    What if the parent comment mentioned this instead: Also WinRAR is a closed source Russian software.
    - Ygg2 5y ago
      To be fair so is AIMP.
  - darkhorn 5y ago
    I forgot about Nginx. Thank you.
  - LinuxBender 5y ago
    To add to this, it may also be worth noting that Russian developers have contributed quite heavily to Linux, BSD, Microsoft Windows and Solaris. I can only assume also MacOS.
- user3939382 5y ago
  Hope you don’t enjoy tetris…
- useFAR 5y ago
  7z is also Russian.
steerablesafe 5y ago
> There is an unofficial unrar that is free and open-source software, but there is no free and open-source rar as creating one is prohibited by the RAR license. From the license (EULA), I assume this is the relevant part: > You may not use, copy, emulate, clone, rent, lease, sell, modify, decompile, disassemble, otherwise reverse engineer, or transfer the licensed software, or any subset of the licensed software, except as provided for in this agreement. Any such unauthorized use shall result in immediate and automatic termination of this license and may result in criminal and/or civil prosecution. > Neither RAR binary code, WinRAR binary code, UnRAR source or UnRAR binary code may be used or reverse engineered to re-create the RAR compression algorithm, which is proprietary, without written permission. > The software may be using components developed and/or copyrighted by third parties. Please read "Acknowledgments" help file topic for WinRAR or acknow.txt text file for other RAR versions for details. Is this actually enforceable? If yes, are there worse outcomes apart from revoking the license? And I mean, the open source unrar, which is supposedly fine, doesn't come with an EULA like this. So it's probably not binding for reverse engineering based on the open source unrar. edit: I mean if there is a separate patent, then it's a different issue.
- CodesInChaos 5y ago
  It looks like newer versions of unrar aren't open source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrar
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Depends on where you live. It's not enforceable in my country according to a lawyer I consulted but it probably is enforceable in the USA. This "you agree not to exercise your rights" pattern is essentially standard legal boilerplate at this point and it boggles my mind that people can get away with it. It inevitably results in the corporation retaining all possible rights and privileges while the consumers own nothing, can do nothing and can have whatever little they have taken away from them if they don't behave.
  - sidewndr46 5y ago
    What confuses me is how does WinRAR continue to exist as a profitable commercial entity? Are there actually enough companies out there paying licensing fees to them for using it? I can't imagine that being the case.
throwaway81523 5y ago
The rar license prohibits writing a compatible compressor? What kind of nonsense is that? I clicked the license link and there is a scary looking anti-reverse-engineering clause, but 1) that sounds legally dubious given how the program is distributed; and 2) there is a FOSS decompressor, and studying that may be sufficient to write a compressor without examining the non-free official compressor. The article is right that there's not much good reason to use rar these days. It is still popular in some communities though. So I've had occasion to run the decompressor, though not the compressor as far as I can remember.
- deleted 5y ago
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- lazka 5y ago
  Microsoft ASF/WMA also has a similar limitation, where it disallows writing an open source implementation if you use the official format specification. Luckily it is too mostly irrelevant nowadays.
  - ur-whale 5y ago
    > Microsoft ASF/WMA also has a similar limitation, Doesn't mean it would in court.
    - nikanj 5y ago
      If you've got the resources to mount a credible legal defence against Microsoft
      - throwaway81523 5y ago
        Microsoft ironically made its fortune by selling software that ran on IBM PC compatible x86 boxes, built around PC BIOS's that started from a clean room reimplementation of the reverse engineered IBM BIOS. IBM itself was not very significant in that market except at the very beginning. Clones for me, but not for thee.
anonu 5y ago
The sightly better file compression with rar is still interesting. But I suppose with today's compute when you think about the time vs space trade-off, time is more important. Space is cheap.
- tropin 5y ago
  Is not just "slightly better" in some cases. An obvious one is repeated files. If RAR encounters a file ten times, it will compress once and store it and nine pointers. lzma and zstd guis i've tested will store ten compressed copies. It happens all the time in backups.
  - daneel_w 5y ago
    > "lzma and zstd guis i've tested will store ten compressed copies" It depends on dictionary size, word size, the actual data etc.
  - jsjohnst 5y ago
    > If RAR encounters a file ten times, it will compress once and store it and nine pointers. A bunch of compression formats do that. Even zip files can, which leads to interesting tricks like: https://www.bamsoftware.com/hacks/zipbomb/ https://www.bamsoftware.com/hacks/zipbomb/
  - anonu 5y ago
    Handling multiple identical files is certainly desirable - but this is not the "core" compression algo. Its a cute optimization trick...
rcarmo 5y ago
There was a time when RAR was extremely popular because it dealt very well with splitting things across multiple diskette-sized archives, and because it edged out PKZIP in compression. Regardless of its origins and... "traditional" use, these days it has zero relevance given that Windows and MacOS (as well as some Linux file managers) allow you to handle zip files without any additional software - and also because many file formats have evolved to support built-in compression. I do find it extremely annoying, though, when I have to help someone rifle through old backups and need to expand a RAR archive, or when someone (for whatever reason) decides to package downloads in that way (the last culprit I remember was a Chinese company who packaged their MCU tooling that way).
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  Mail servers still have restriction on attachment size. RAR is the most convenient way in this situation.
  - vetinari 5y ago
    Also, when mail scanners became too nosy, it was convenient that rar could encrypt metadata, so the archive could not be scanned. It lasted only for a while. Gmail drops such files entirely for the last few years.
- exmadscientist 5y ago
  RAR is still the only format that has PAR2 (?) recovery records trivially available. So it's still the best for long-term archiving.
  - ihateolives 5y ago
    Yeah, I don't know why this is never mentioned in comparisons. This is nice to have feature. I wouldn't care at all about speed for long term archiving, because it's one time occurrence, but I would care whether archive format has extra safety feature against bit rot.
  - adrian_b 5y ago
user3939382 5y ago
This is pretty light on substance, essentially it and the post it points to says: it’s not a free license and there are better alternatives. The post it links to saying they don’t want people to use free commercial software seems odd, I’m not sure I get it. The author thinks people won’t buy his software because WinRAR’s trial doesn’t expire?
mrsaint 5y ago
I tried Peazip for Linux but it didn't quite work for me. I remember it as kinda buggy, and anyhow, it works like a Gui wrapper that uses external console binaries to perform actual compression/decompression tasks rather than having the routines built-in. Regarding zstd: I would love to use it cross-platform, but zstd for Windows is still kinda exotic, and yes, it misses proper Gui applications. Now, if Winrar would support zstd... :P :P
prmoustache 5y ago
I haven't came accross a single rar file for years. Last was when I was a teenager in the mid/late 90's downloading pirated games/app.
- jonp888 5y ago
  It seems to be still fairly widely used in Germany in non-programming environments(game mods etc.).
wyattpeak 5y ago
Does anyone know why RAR is better compression-wise than the two more modern standards? It doesn't seem like it's been updated in a long time, and I would have expected modern software from two of the best houses in the world to handily beat it. Is it that good, or is it a matter of priorities, or something else?
- lifthrasiir 5y ago
  > Does anyone know why RAR is better compression-wise than the two more modern standards? It simply uses a much slower algorithm (prediction by partial matching, PPM) in the highest setting. Those modern standards are designed to be fast enough and improve the status quo in that performance target. If they were only concerned about the compression ratio there are tons of other algorithms that would handily beat RAR already.
  - sumtechguy 5y ago
    7zip also has a ton of settings where you can get it in the same ballpark of compression ratio. But LZMA2 usually consumes more memory to do better. It also takes a decent amount of time the more you fiddle those settings. The defaults on 7zip are fairly tame but 'good enough'. I found in my cases if you turn on solid archiving and duplicate file matching you are usually just as good as RAR or usually better. But costs speed.
- noAnswer 5y ago
  > It doesn't seem like it's been updated in a long time It is actively maintained. https://www.rarlab.com/rarnew.htm https://www.rarlab.com/rarnew.htm A view years ago, with rar5, it got a modernised file-format.
- xattt 5y ago
  UHARC is more efficient than any of them, but no one uses it.
  - useFAR 5y ago
    UHARC looks abandoned and does not support 64bit OS My memory might be bad on this, but UHARC niche was media files, while rar was good tool for everything.
mikl 5y ago
Good luck trying to send a file compressed with Zstd or Brotli to people and have them know what to do with them. I’d certainly have to google to figure out how to open one of those. And I’m an engineer and aware that those formats exist.
- deleted 5y ago
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  - deleted 5y ago
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- lifthrasiir 5y ago
  Zstandard and Brotli are also not an archiving format, which the layperson normally expects to be a "compression" format, so the comparison is a bit off. But that doesn't really matter because there is 7-zip which is an archiving format AND compression format AND competitive to RAR AND open-source.
  - ramraj07 5y ago
    But slower.
    - lifthrasiir 5y ago
      It depends on which time you measure. 7zip's LZMA2 is, like most LZ algorithms, asymmetric that it is quite fast to decompress no matter how much you spend on the compression. By comparison RAR uses PPM in the highest setting, which is more or less symmetric so the compression and decompression takes about the same amount of time. When the target ratio is roughly same and high enough, LZMA2 is indeed slower than (RAR's implementation of) PPM for the compression but much faster for the decompression.
      - account42 5y ago
        > It depends on which time you measure. 7zip's LZMA2 is, like most LZ algorithms, asymmetric that it is quite fast to decompress no matter how much you spend on the compression. In fact, better compression with LZ formats often means faster decompression (at least compared to other settings of the same format) as there is less compressed data to pass through the expensive entropy coder (which itself has symmetric cost for encoding and decoding).
brabel 5y ago
I was hoping this would be about OAuth 2.0 Rich Authorization Requests[1]! [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-oauth-rar https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-oauth-rar
Proven 5y ago
noAnswer 5y ago
RAR is a full-blown backup format* while 7zip is "just" an archive format. So comparisons are somewhat mood. But even I as a RAR fan and license holder have to agree. For the average joe, sending email attachments, zip or 7z is enough. * It can safe all three file timestamps (From nanoseconds precision (with NTFS), down to only 2 seconds precision (if you want to shave of a view bytes)), ACLs, ADS, Hard and Soft Links, Unix devices. It can add restore data to protect from bit rot. It deduplicates identical files. Variable length part-files. Skips already compressed files. etc. etc. (+ the GUI supports settings-profiles, which i really miss in 7zip.)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 300bps 5y ago
  Yeah I use RAR daily and I have no interest in using a tool made by companies who exist to collect data and use it to serve you ads. I’d rather pay $29 for a lifetime license than have any chance at giving more data about me to Google or Facebook.
  - Someone1234 5y ago
    I'm not sure what you're talking about. The major tool promoted in the article is 7Zip which is not made by either Google or Facebook, costs $0, and doesn't contain ads or collect data. The two tools which are made by Google or Facebook are command line utilities which also don't contain ads.
    - 300bps 5y ago
      7zip is just one of three applications mentioned in the article and the article says it’s much slower and seems to more recommend offerings from Facebook and Google. First off, 7-Zip achieves a better compression ratio, but it is much slower to compress than RAR. However, since 2013 Google's Brotli and since 2015 Facebook's Zstandard (Zstd) are two good options for file compression. I didn’t say either of them contained ads. I said that both companies offering them exist to collect data and serve ads. I stand by that I have no interest in using any tool that they provide. 7zip is a fine application but as others have covered here it is not a full replacement for RAR. So I’ll continue using RAR daily.
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
I used RAR all the time in late 1990s-early 00s. It had great usability, great FAR Manager integration - unsurprising since they both were created by the same person, Eugene Roshal (incidentally, he was studying a few years earlier on the same faculty / specialty as I). But when I switched to GNU/Linux, the reasons to use RAR died quietly. It had a good run, but didn't get the widespread platform support it needed to succeed as an archive standard. It being a proprietary product didn't help in that, I guess.
jerrygoyal 5y ago
on a related note, Keka is a good (and free) gui tool for mac that supports wide array of archiving formats.
Ayesh 5y ago
I strongly prefer WinRAR (the software) because it does everything I am looking for in an archiving and compressing software. - It is a great tool for archiving. Especially in Windows, it is often faster to compress a rar archive than copying several hundreds of files. This fills the lack of a `tar` tool in Windows space. - It supports changing the compression level during the compression. - Highly backwards compatible format. The newer rar format is opt-in. - WinRAR supports various formats such as ISO, JAR, and a few typical zip-ish formats. - Superior drag and drop support. - Context-aware extraction. For example, if you double click a PNG, it only extracts that PNG file. For an exe, it extracts the whole thing. - Splitting files, locked archives, AES protection, SFX, and other features are easily accessible. I use 7-zip for zstd, and brotli cli when I particularly need those formats. For my personal archives, rar format and WinRAR never let me down. Yes, I get that it's not an open source software and doesn't come with a permissive license, but neither do Windows OS itself, and many other software I use. There is an open source unrar, so I don't fear being locked out on my archived. I happily paid the $29 even though I could absolutely use it without paying a dime, just like thousands of other users.
- lifthrasiir 5y ago
  I avoid any proprietary data compression software because they tend to try to lock you in their own file formats. Not just WinRAR, I've seen such attempts at least twice just in my own country (South Korea). I don't want to take a risk that I can't (freely) open my own archive later; I'm aware the risk would be much smaller for WinRAR, but that's still unacceptable for me.
- Tajnymag 5y ago
  Most of these, if no all, is covered by 7-zip.
  - useFAR 5y ago
    7z does not offer archive recovery. This has saved my archived data couple of times, which would be gone, if I was using 7z.
ConfusedDog 5y ago
https://peazip.github.io/peazip-compression-benchmark.html https://peazip.github.io/peazip-compression-benchmark.html Can’t beat zip’s availability even though it is quite slow… zstd compress/extract speed seems to be the best overall.
Krisjohn 5y ago
Meanwhile, I keep saving the WinRK installer from my antivirus software.
trevormcneal 5y ago
Don't listen to peasants, use RAR
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Don't listen to peasants Is this to be read as a Czarist "Who cares about those mushiks?" or as a Stalinist "They're all kulaks anyway!" ?
crispyambulance 5y ago
I've used winRAR for a long time because of the "self-extracting executable" feature. You can set it up to create an exe (instead of a rar) that extracts files to a particular location and then runs arbitrary commands. It's like a super simple ghetto-fabulous installer and it just works. Now I wonder what else can do that as easily in a windows environment? I haven't looked around because I haven't needed to but now I am curious. And yes, the winRAR UI is getting a bit long in the tooth.
- Horba 5y ago
  You can have that with updates using Squirrel; https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows.
- Calavar 5y ago
  Inno Setup (https://jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php https://jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php). Probably not quite as easy as WinRAR, but close. It comes with an IDE with a point and click wizard for simple installers (i.e. just copy files from A to B).
- lifthrasiir 5y ago
  7-zip also supports SFX archives. Its implementation also supports a post-decompression command, which is to my knowledge not yet implemented in the 7-zip UI but you can write a small batch file to make one.
Cloudef 5y ago
The worst part of rar (and zip) is that they don't specify filename encoding so you'll end up with a encoding hell.
pabs3 5y ago
There is open source support for RAR in unar: https://theunarchiver.com/command-line https://theunarchiver.com/command-line
- cesarb 5y ago
  I've encountered RAR files unar cannot open. It seems there are several versions of the RAR format, and unar only understands the older ones.
  - pabs3 5y ago
    Hmm, I thought unar supported the latest versions, while the open source version of unrar was the one that didn't support the latest versions.
pmichaud 5y ago
I’m not fully convinced of my own position here, but I have long suspected that “zipping” at all is an abstraction that shouldn’t really be exposed to the user. Like it’s a throwback to an earlier era. The basic trade off is size for speed, and it seems like most cases it could handled automatically at the level of the file system maybe. Like if I have a big file that I want to send, it sort of feels like the software I use to send it should do the work of preparing it for transport to the target system. Similarly, if there are files that aren’t being touched very often shouldn’t the file system figure out that file can be in “small, slow” mode? Or maybe if I know a particular file should be always fast or always small, I should have the option in the file properties for it to be Automatic, Always Small, or Always Fast, like a toggle right near the permissions controls. But not like a separate program that generates separate, smaller, slower files of a special type. Why can’t folders be automatically treated like singular archives when I try to do operations on them for which that makes sense? Why do I have to think about these details? I’m probably missing some important use cases and archiving features, but maybe those can be broken out from the default of “do the obvious thing automatically.”
- mavhc 5y ago
  Folders can be compressed archive files with the right OS/fake filesystem combination, although that's mostly ease of use. The main 2 reasons for an archive file are giving to someone else, or compression. The FS can do compression these days, so it's mostly about giving 1 file to someone else, not 1000. Using archive files to avoid excess file wastage seems like a bad idea, make the FS better instead
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  > Why can’t folders be automatically treated like singular archives when I try to do operations on them for which that makes sense? Why do I have to think about these details? Operating systems do blur the boundaries of this a bit, now -- you can explore zip files as if they were folders, mount disk images from files, and you can work with folders as bundles (e.g. a macOS application is a disguised bundle, an RTFD document is a directory with contents etc.) Some applications (like mail apps) have always done a good job of handling (combining, compressing) folders so they can be moved/sent as files. The problem is all of these application things are probably best done at a GUI level. At a filesystem/command line level you want the distinction to be explicit. Of course a few OSes ditch the distinction entirely and concern themselves only with objects -- OS/400 for example. Which might be closer to the world you are imagining.
minroot 5y ago
The argument on increasing bandwidths is evil.
hannob 5y ago
FWIW libarchive and its commandline tool bsdtar, which are widely available and often installed by default on Linux hosts, is able to unpack most rar files. Other than that I agree with the post, but if you have a rar file and need to unpack it that's often good to know.
- tssva 5y ago
  Windows has included libarchive and bsdtar by default starting with the April 2018 Update, so they can also be used there to unpack most rar files.
ksec 5y ago
If you have half decent internet connection, Compressing and Decompressing the files is going to take more time than simply just sending it or downloading it. I still remember we use to compare compression tools and format on compression ratio. But I cant record the last time I care about any of these any more. If it needs to compress just use zip. The same happened to Audio Codec as well. Video Codec is where we still have lots of work. And it is sort of strange RAR comes up, something we used to use everyday and is now for most people completely forgotten.
- account42 5y ago
  > If you have half decent internet connection, Compressing and Decompressing the files is going to take more time than simply just sending it or downloading it. This might be true for transmitting files 1-to-1 (and even then, for every connection speed slower than memory there is likely a compression algorithm that makes sense) but most files are distributed 1-to-many which is why algorithms like deflate that might be slow to compress but are fast to decompress make sense. For example, Linux distributions would not keep switching between gz, bzip2, xz and now zstd for their packages if the choice was pointless.
  - ksec 5y ago
    It is just an observation I have for quite some time. Right now iOS and macOS spend more time decompressing and verifying the update / download than the time it spend to do transfer. I understand not everyone has fast interest, but someday we may want to start optimise for end to end time rather than just downloading time.
nix23 5y ago
Don't use xz or 7-zip...use lzip: https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/safety_of_the_lzip_format.html https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/safety_of_the_lzip_format.html https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/manual/lzip_manual.html#Quality-assurance https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/manual/lzip_manual.html#Quality-... https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html
wackget 5y ago
Oh the irony of recommending formats made by Google and Facebook - two of the largest enemies of the internet.
rcfox 5y ago
One benefit of RAR is when dealing with multi-file archives, you don't need all of the files to be able to decompress one of them. You don't even need a complete file to be able to look inside! Yes, some of your files will be broken if you don't have the entire archive, but at least you can salvage some of your data. Or you can peek in to make sure you've got the right thing before committing to multi-gigabyte downloads.
- noAnswer 5y ago
  Yes, it is pretty annoying if someone posts a .7z.001 file on usenet. You can't peek inside. You can't even see if it's password protected until you downloaded the whole thing.
kazinator 5y ago
"Furthermore, the small differences in the resulting file size matter less over time as bandwidth is increasing and increasing fast." Firstly, this argument, if true, would add up to: if you're on Windows, don't use anything other than ZIP. The argument is not true, because although increasing storage and communication resources make compression less relevant for small files, there is content which is getting larger because of available bandwidth, including aggregations of smaller content.
abruzzi 5y ago
I have never by choice used rar /or/ 7z. I'm not a heavy user of compression, just the occasional "compress for transport", so to me any savings in file size is an unnoticable rounding error, even 15 years ago. Far more important to me is the simplicity of having tools for compression/decompression built into pretty much any computer that might receive my file, and where the receiver of the file, who may not be technologically adept, knows what it is without me having to explain that it is a compressed file and they neeed to get some tool to decompress it.
KronisLV 5y ago
For all of my compression needs, i usually go for 7-Zip for longer term storage (since while it is noticeably slower than the alternatives, the ratios can be really good for formats that compress well, e.g. anything other than images or videos). I also use ZIP for when i need good compatibility and relatively fast compression (since zip/unzip are easy to use as far as CLIs got and 7-Zip also supports the format, as does whatever my *nix distro at the choice has for a GUI compression program). I sometimes use tar with GZip for when i just want to temporarily compress something to move between servers without worrying about file permissions etc.
jccalhoun 5y ago
Ive been a user of 7-zip for years. I've recently switched to NanaZip which is a fork which works with windows 11 new context menu and adds in some other niceties. https://github.com/M2Team/NanaZip https://github.com/M2Team/NanaZip
kristianpaul 5y ago
Haven't use RAR in ages, i asume was not a popular format anymore.
bombcar 5y ago
If you're using compression, and you have more than one core, you should consider trying pbzip2 - it's parallel http://compression.ca/pbzip2/ http://compression.ca/pbzip2/ 7zip may also do something similar, but it may depend on the archive type it's creating.
- Hello71 5y ago
  bzip2 is almost always the worst option. it is significantly slower and results in larger output than xz, which is in turn slower and larger than 7zip (lzma2).
kosasbest 5y ago
Interesting that the warez scene adopted RAR as the standard for packaging up pirated works. The alternatives like 7z save more bytes, yet RAR somehow became the winner. Anyone know why?
- warmwaffles 5y ago
  It's just a part of the scene. Momentum is a hell of a thing to stop in that respect. I don't know if 7zip or any other format will spit out chunked files in 50MB or 100MB part files for "easier" distribution. I say "easier" because it's the poor mans format to send files without using offsets to resume downloads.
- VorticonCmdr 5y ago
  Most likely because it is older. WinRAR was first released 1995 according to Wikipedia, 7-Zip 1999.
- dole 5y ago
  RAR's initial release was 1993, 7z's 1999. IIRC, I remembered seeing RAR's in the scene around 1995, 1996 or so. My take: RAR handled splitting to multiple arbitrary-sized volumes more gracefully than ARJ/ARC which were CLI first and never had a Windows GUI that was as nicely polished as WinRAR was. SFVs made error checking and redownloading corrupted volumes easy without relying on the compression format to handle it. ACE just came too late. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(warez) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(warez) Edit: another major use case overlooked here: a considerable amount of media applications will stream files from within a RAR archive without manually unarchiving beforehand, making them more accessible from file storage sites like mega, 1fichier, without carrying the external appearance/negative baggage of an mp4 or mkv.
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    > I remembered seeing RAR's in the scene around 1995, 1996 or so. My take: RAR handled splitting to multiple arbitrary-sized volumes more gracefully than ARJ/ARC which were CLI first and never had a Windows GUI that was as nicely polished as WinRAR was. Of course there were still people who screwed that up. I remember downloading some software once that came in the form of a multi-volume RAR, maybe 20 floppy disk-sized RARs. Download all 20 of them, get them in the same directory, then un-rar them, and lo and behold out the other end comes a single .RAR file that was inside! So I un-rar that single RAR, and out the other end comes 20 separate floppy disk images. Obviously the "scene" distributors weren't always the computing world's best and brightest...
joshspankit 5y ago
PeaZip (the GUI app linked in the article) does support [ARJ](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30466484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30466484)...
jandrese 5y ago
Here I thought it was going to be because the RAR tools are all still single threaded and get their pants blown off by anything that can spread the work across the cores on any modern chip.
tediousdemise 5y ago
I'm eagerly awaiting a technological breakthrough in storage that renders compression pointless.
SSLy 5y ago
the only remaining usecase for rar are warez FTP's
phantop 5y ago
I typically don't make use of standard archive formats these days for my own file storage. If I want just pure maximum compression, I'll often use a long-range matcher like FreeArc's srep [1] or lrzip [2] combined with either fast-lzma2 [3] using a p7zip fork [4] for multithreading and fast compression or use mcm [5] or zpaq for max ratio with longer compression time. However, my truly preferred way is using dwarfs [6], which features some really good deduplication and (by default) zstd compression while being mountable. Most of my files are highly compressed and easily accessible without needing to full decompress them. I even made a small script to convert and create AppImages that instead use this [7]. Admittedly, I don't make use of PAR2 or anything of the sort, but I could just do that the traditional way if I so wished. [1]: https://github.com/Phantop/srep https://github.com/Phantop/srep [2]: https://github.com/ckolivas/lrzip https://github.com/ckolivas/lrzip [3]: https://github.com/conor42/fast-lzma2 https://github.com/conor42/fast-lzma2 [4]: https://github.com/jinfeihan57/p7zip https://github.com/jinfeihan57/p7zip [5]: https://github.com/mathieuchartier/mcm https://github.com/mathieuchartier/mcm [6]: https://github.com/mhx/dwarfs/ https://github.com/mhx/dwarfs/ [7]: https://github.com/Phantop/appdwarf/ https://github.com/Phantop/appdwarf/

Don't Use RAR

209 points by vedranm 5y ago

thrower123 5y ago

WinRar at least is a much better UI than 7-Zip.

Ygg2 5y ago
That's debatable, 7zip UI is servicable.

causi 5y ago

All things considered, there are no reasons left to use RAR. I sometimes run into RAR files that 7zip thinks are corrupt but WinRAR opens just fine. That by itself means I keep it installed. It doesn't hurt that the GUI is more pleasant.

lifthrasiir 5y ago
I believe "us[ing] RAR" here means the creation of new RAR files. In fact your experience strikes me as another reason to actively avoid RAR; there is no guarantee that your RAR archive can be decompressed with third-party softwares other than WinRAR itself.
- useFAR 5y ago
  >>In fact your experience strikes me as another reason to actively avoid RAR; This is only your reason. >>there is no guarantee that your RAR archive can be decompressed with third-party softwares other than WinRAR itself. I'm perfectly fine, that my personal files would not be opened by someone, who is actively avoiding RAR(in my personal use - after rar was lha, that I used for archiving, because no one else knew what was that). And if I am sending my files to someone, then they will sure know how to use RAR. What others will do with THEIR PERSONAL FILES - does not concern me at all - and should not concern author of article, that heavily mixes public and personal use of archivers. If some of the points might be applicable to public use - perhaps, but it is questionable, that opinion of blog writer can have any authority on this matter, where everyone will be doing what is best for them, so the actual true value(where it is only worth to "prove" others how you are right and other are not) of this high opinionated article is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - causi 5y ago
    Right. Because I'm a fan of not starving to death myself, I have no problem paying people for goods and services and hence don't agree with the "closed source is a sin" stance of the author. RAR is both faster and more pleasant to use on a daily basis than 7zip, so that's what I use for all my own files. If I'm going to host data or send it to someone who I know uses 7zip, then I'll use that. Generally though when I have a need to send compressed files I have no idea what the recipient has installed so I'm forced to use regular zip files.

sintapilgo 5y ago

The main feature from WinRAR I don't see in other GUIs is the ability to search within file contents (text) inside archives.

wink 5y ago

I have not used or even opened a .rar archive in probably 10 years. I am absolutely surprised about the amount of comments of people actively using it or even saying anything good about WinRAR. Wow. Disclaimer: I use Windows and Linux daily.

bullen 5y ago

https://github.com/kuba--/zip https://github.com/kuba--/zip

EdwardDiego 5y ago

RAR reminds me very much of Limewire/eMule/Kazaa days.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
agumonkey 5y ago
to me it goes back to Doom days
- anilakar 5y ago
  Nah, it was all about .arj then.
  - DocTomoe 5y ago
    Anyone remember .zoo? Those were the days...
    - EdwardDiego 5y ago
      I do now that you mentioned it. And there was an archive format starting with LZ* right? LZW? LZJ? I mainly hit that one when downloading .MOD music. (Edit, huh, .ZOO was based on LSW, so maybe I'm conflating the two)
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        LZW sounds familiar, LZJ doesn't.
  - krige 5y ago
    powerpacker or bust, baby
  - EdwardDiego 5y ago
    Oh wow, ARJ, and of course, ARC. Now I want to dial up to a BBS with my fancy 14.4K modem and download WADs via ZMODEM.

hajhatten 5y ago

I've only seen the use of .rar in scene related materials. And even there it's not used as frequently anymore.

TomGullen 5y ago

For my brothers birthday one year I bought him a license for RAR

smilespray 5y ago
So you're the one who kept the company running!
Aisen8010 5y ago
I remember downloading a torrent of winrar compressed in rar when I was younger. That troll gave me a good laugh.
ValentineC 5y ago
Relevant subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PaidForWinRAR/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PaidForWinRAR/ :)

david_draco 5y ago

This is conflating archive format with compression algorithm. The very broad statement "7-Zip achieves a better compression ratio, but it is much slower to compress than RAR" should be demonstrated over all compression levels with a curve of compression-ratio vs time. I am skeptical RAR cannot be outperformed by 7zip in at least some situations. The license is the strongest argument to not use RAR.

ihateolives 5y ago
> The license is the strongest argument to not use RAR. Why? Most of the daily tools that keep business world running are closed source. Excel. Or Photoshop. Or Windows/MacOS itself. But RAR license and not being open source is now pushing it too far? Really?
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Its okay to have some business spesific software be closed source, say Excell. But an archive is needed every time you download a collection of files from a government website, or make GDPR request for your data to google. So by choosing RAR you would be forcing millions of people, maybe entire country to use that company's product and giving them power. Is there any good reason for that?
  - vetinari 5y ago
    And what's the difference compared to forcing docx/xlsx or psd? The network effects affect every exchange, not just archives.
    - klez 5y ago
      docx/xslx are open formats. About psd, yes, that's proprietary. What government agency mandates its use for the public to interact with them? (genuinely asking, not being snarky)
      - 5y ago

darkhorn 5y ago

rvz 5y ago
and? Everyone is using nginx and that was made by a Russian, does that mean we should stop using it? This is why 'guilt by association' doesn't work with your 'point'.
- ismayilzadan 5y ago
  What if the parent comment mentioned this instead: Also WinRAR is a closed source Russian software.
  - Ygg2 5y ago
    To be fair so is AIMP.
- darkhorn 5y ago
  I forgot about Nginx. Thank you.
- LinuxBender 5y ago
  To add to this, it may also be worth noting that Russian developers have contributed quite heavily to Linux, BSD, Microsoft Windows and Solaris. I can only assume also MacOS.
user3939382 5y ago
Hope you don’t enjoy tetris…
useFAR 5y ago
7z is also Russian.

steerablesafe 5y ago

> There is an unofficial unrar that is free and open-source software, but there is no free and open-source rar as creating one is prohibited by the RAR license. From the license (EULA), I assume this is the relevant part: > You may not use, copy, emulate, clone, rent, lease, sell, modify, decompile, disassemble, otherwise reverse engineer, or transfer the licensed software, or any subset of the licensed software, except as provided for in this agreement. Any such unauthorized use shall result in immediate and automatic termination of this license and may result in criminal and/or civil prosecution. > Neither RAR binary code, WinRAR binary code, UnRAR source or UnRAR binary code may be used or reverse engineered to re-create the RAR compression algorithm, which is proprietary, without written permission. > The software may be using components developed and/or copyrighted by third parties. Please read "Acknowledgments" help file topic for WinRAR or acknow.txt text file for other RAR versions for details. Is this actually enforceable? If yes, are there worse outcomes apart from revoking the license? And I mean, the open source unrar, which is supposedly fine, doesn't come with an EULA like this. So it's probably not binding for reverse engineering based on the open source unrar. edit: I mean if there is a separate patent, then it's a different issue.

CodesInChaos 5y ago
It looks like newer versions of unrar aren't open source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrar
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Depends on where you live. It's not enforceable in my country according to a lawyer I consulted but it probably is enforceable in the USA. This "you agree not to exercise your rights" pattern is essentially standard legal boilerplate at this point and it boggles my mind that people can get away with it. It inevitably results in the corporation retaining all possible rights and privileges while the consumers own nothing, can do nothing and can have whatever little they have taken away from them if they don't behave.
- sidewndr46 5y ago
  What confuses me is how does WinRAR continue to exist as a profitable commercial entity? Are there actually enough companies out there paying licensing fees to them for using it? I can't imagine that being the case.

throwaway81523 5y ago

The rar license prohibits writing a compatible compressor? What kind of nonsense is that? I clicked the license link and there is a scary looking anti-reverse-engineering clause, but 1) that sounds legally dubious given how the program is distributed; and 2) there is a FOSS decompressor, and studying that may be sufficient to write a compressor without examining the non-free official compressor. The article is right that there's not much good reason to use rar these days. It is still popular in some communities though. So I've had occasion to run the decompressor, though not the compressor as far as I can remember.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lazka 5y ago
Microsoft ASF/WMA also has a similar limitation, where it disallows writing an open source implementation if you use the official format specification. Luckily it is too mostly irrelevant nowadays.
- ur-whale 5y ago
  > Microsoft ASF/WMA also has a similar limitation, Doesn't mean it would in court.
  - nikanj 5y ago
    If you've got the resources to mount a credible legal defence against Microsoft
    - throwaway81523 5y ago
      Microsoft ironically made its fortune by selling software that ran on IBM PC compatible x86 boxes, built around PC BIOS's that started from a clean room reimplementation of the reverse engineered IBM BIOS. IBM itself was not very significant in that market except at the very beginning. Clones for me, but not for thee.

anonu 5y ago

The sightly better file compression with rar is still interesting. But I suppose with today's compute when you think about the time vs space trade-off, time is more important. Space is cheap.

tropin 5y ago
Is not just "slightly better" in some cases. An obvious one is repeated files. If RAR encounters a file ten times, it will compress once and store it and nine pointers. lzma and zstd guis i've tested will store ten compressed copies. It happens all the time in backups.
- daneel_w 5y ago
  > "lzma and zstd guis i've tested will store ten compressed copies" It depends on dictionary size, word size, the actual data etc.
- jsjohnst 5y ago
  > If RAR encounters a file ten times, it will compress once and store it and nine pointers. A bunch of compression formats do that. Even zip files can, which leads to interesting tricks like: https://www.bamsoftware.com/hacks/zipbomb/ https://www.bamsoftware.com/hacks/zipbomb/
- anonu 5y ago
  Handling multiple identical files is certainly desirable - but this is not the "core" compression algo. Its a cute optimization trick...

rcarmo 5y ago

There was a time when RAR was extremely popular because it dealt very well with splitting things across multiple diskette-sized archives, and because it edged out PKZIP in compression. Regardless of its origins and... "traditional" use, these days it has zero relevance given that Windows and MacOS (as well as some Linux file managers) allow you to handle zip files without any additional software - and also because many file formats have evolved to support built-in compression. I do find it extremely annoying, though, when I have to help someone rifle through old backups and need to expand a RAR archive, or when someone (for whatever reason) decides to package downloads in that way (the last culprit I remember was a Chinese company who packaged their MCU tooling that way).

vbezhenar 5y ago
Mail servers still have restriction on attachment size. RAR is the most convenient way in this situation.
- vetinari 5y ago
  Also, when mail scanners became too nosy, it was convenient that rar could encrypt metadata, so the archive could not be scanned. It lasted only for a while. Gmail drops such files entirely for the last few years.
exmadscientist 5y ago
RAR is still the only format that has PAR2 (?) recovery records trivially available. So it's still the best for long-term archiving.
- ihateolives 5y ago
  Yeah, I don't know why this is never mentioned in comparisons. This is nice to have feature. I wouldn't care at all about speed for long term archiving, because it's one time occurrence, but I would care whether archive format has extra safety feature against bit rot.
- adrian_b 5y ago

user3939382 5y ago

This is pretty light on substance, essentially it and the post it points to says: it’s not a free license and there are better alternatives. The post it links to saying they don’t want people to use free commercial software seems odd, I’m not sure I get it. The author thinks people won’t buy his software because WinRAR’s trial doesn’t expire?

mrsaint 5y ago

I tried Peazip for Linux but it didn't quite work for me. I remember it as kinda buggy, and anyhow, it works like a Gui wrapper that uses external console binaries to perform actual compression/decompression tasks rather than having the routines built-in. Regarding zstd: I would love to use it cross-platform, but zstd for Windows is still kinda exotic, and yes, it misses proper Gui applications. Now, if Winrar would support zstd... :P :P

prmoustache 5y ago

I haven't came accross a single rar file for years. Last was when I was a teenager in the mid/late 90's downloading pirated games/app.

jonp888 5y ago
It seems to be still fairly widely used in Germany in non-programming environments(game mods etc.).

wyattpeak 5y ago

Does anyone know why RAR is better compression-wise than the two more modern standards? It doesn't seem like it's been updated in a long time, and I would have expected modern software from two of the best houses in the world to handily beat it. Is it that good, or is it a matter of priorities, or something else?

lifthrasiir 5y ago
> Does anyone know why RAR is better compression-wise than the two more modern standards? It simply uses a much slower algorithm (prediction by partial matching, PPM) in the highest setting. Those modern standards are designed to be fast enough and improve the status quo in that performance target. If they were only concerned about the compression ratio there are tons of other algorithms that would handily beat RAR already.
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  7zip also has a ton of settings where you can get it in the same ballpark of compression ratio. But LZMA2 usually consumes more memory to do better. It also takes a decent amount of time the more you fiddle those settings. The defaults on 7zip are fairly tame but 'good enough'. I found in my cases if you turn on solid archiving and duplicate file matching you are usually just as good as RAR or usually better. But costs speed.
noAnswer 5y ago
> It doesn't seem like it's been updated in a long time It is actively maintained. https://www.rarlab.com/rarnew.htm https://www.rarlab.com/rarnew.htm A view years ago, with rar5, it got a modernised file-format.
xattt 5y ago
UHARC is more efficient than any of them, but no one uses it.
- useFAR 5y ago
  UHARC looks abandoned and does not support 64bit OS My memory might be bad on this, but UHARC niche was media files, while rar was good tool for everything.

mikl 5y ago

Good luck trying to send a file compressed with Zstd or Brotli to people and have them know what to do with them. I’d certainly have to google to figure out how to open one of those. And I’m an engineer and aware that those formats exist.

deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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lifthrasiir 5y ago
Zstandard and Brotli are also not an archiving format, which the layperson normally expects to be a "compression" format, so the comparison is a bit off. But that doesn't really matter because there is 7-zip which is an archiving format AND compression format AND competitive to RAR AND open-source.
- ramraj07 5y ago
  But slower.
  - lifthrasiir 5y ago
    It depends on which time you measure. 7zip's LZMA2 is, like most LZ algorithms, asymmetric that it is quite fast to decompress no matter how much you spend on the compression. By comparison RAR uses PPM in the highest setting, which is more or less symmetric so the compression and decompression takes about the same amount of time. When the target ratio is roughly same and high enough, LZMA2 is indeed slower than (RAR's implementation of) PPM for the compression but much faster for the decompression.
    - account42 5y ago
      > It depends on which time you measure. 7zip's LZMA2 is, like most LZ algorithms, asymmetric that it is quite fast to decompress no matter how much you spend on the compression. In fact, better compression with LZ formats often means faster decompression (at least compared to other settings of the same format) as there is less compressed data to pass through the expensive entropy coder (which itself has symmetric cost for encoding and decoding).

brabel 5y ago

I was hoping this would be about OAuth 2.0 Rich Authorization Requests[1]! [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-oauth-rar https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-oauth-rar

Proven 5y ago

noAnswer 5y ago

RAR is a full-blown backup format* while 7zip is "just" an archive format. So comparisons are somewhat mood. But even I as a RAR fan and license holder have to agree. For the average joe, sending email attachments, zip or 7z is enough. * It can safe all three file timestamps (From nanoseconds precision (with NTFS), down to only 2 seconds precision (if you want to shave of a view bytes)), ACLs, ADS, Hard and Soft Links, Unix devices. It can add restore data to protect from bit rot. It deduplicates identical files. Variable length part-files. Skips already compressed files. etc. etc. (+ the GUI supports settings-profiles, which i really miss in 7zip.)

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
300bps 5y ago
Yeah I use RAR daily and I have no interest in using a tool made by companies who exist to collect data and use it to serve you ads. I’d rather pay $29 for a lifetime license than have any chance at giving more data about me to Google or Facebook.
- Someone1234 5y ago
  I'm not sure what you're talking about. The major tool promoted in the article is 7Zip which is not made by either Google or Facebook, costs $0, and doesn't contain ads or collect data. The two tools which are made by Google or Facebook are command line utilities which also don't contain ads.
  - 300bps 5y ago
    7zip is just one of three applications mentioned in the article and the article says it’s much slower and seems to more recommend offerings from Facebook and Google. First off, 7-Zip achieves a better compression ratio, but it is much slower to compress than RAR. However, since 2013 Google's Brotli and since 2015 Facebook's Zstandard (Zstd) are two good options for file compression. I didn’t say either of them contained ads. I said that both companies offering them exist to collect data and serve ads. I stand by that I have no interest in using any tool that they provide. 7zip is a fine application but as others have covered here it is not a full replacement for RAR. So I’ll continue using RAR daily.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

I used RAR all the time in late 1990s-early 00s. It had great usability, great FAR Manager integration - unsurprising since they both were created by the same person, Eugene Roshal (incidentally, he was studying a few years earlier on the same faculty / specialty as I). But when I switched to GNU/Linux, the reasons to use RAR died quietly. It had a good run, but didn't get the widespread platform support it needed to succeed as an archive standard. It being a proprietary product didn't help in that, I guess.

jerrygoyal 5y ago

on a related note, Keka is a good (and free) gui tool for mac that supports wide array of archiving formats.

Ayesh 5y ago

I strongly prefer WinRAR (the software) because it does everything I am looking for in an archiving and compressing software. - It is a great tool for archiving. Especially in Windows, it is often faster to compress a rar archive than copying several hundreds of files. This fills the lack of a `tar` tool in Windows space. - It supports changing the compression level during the compression. - Highly backwards compatible format. The newer rar format is opt-in. - WinRAR supports various formats such as ISO, JAR, and a few typical zip-ish formats. - Superior drag and drop support. - Context-aware extraction. For example, if you double click a PNG, it only extracts that PNG file. For an exe, it extracts the whole thing. - Splitting files, locked archives, AES protection, SFX, and other features are easily accessible. I use 7-zip for zstd, and brotli cli when I particularly need those formats. For my personal archives, rar format and WinRAR never let me down. Yes, I get that it's not an open source software and doesn't come with a permissive license, but neither do Windows OS itself, and many other software I use. There is an open source unrar, so I don't fear being locked out on my archived. I happily paid the $29 even though I could absolutely use it without paying a dime, just like thousands of other users.

lifthrasiir 5y ago
I avoid any proprietary data compression software because they tend to try to lock you in their own file formats. Not just WinRAR, I've seen such attempts at least twice just in my own country (South Korea). I don't want to take a risk that I can't (freely) open my own archive later; I'm aware the risk would be much smaller for WinRAR, but that's still unacceptable for me.
Tajnymag 5y ago
Most of these, if no all, is covered by 7-zip.
- useFAR 5y ago
  7z does not offer archive recovery. This has saved my archived data couple of times, which would be gone, if I was using 7z.

ConfusedDog 5y ago

https://peazip.github.io/peazip-compression-benchmark.html https://peazip.github.io/peazip-compression-benchmark.html Can’t beat zip’s availability even though it is quite slow… zstd compress/extract speed seems to be the best overall.

Krisjohn 5y ago

Meanwhile, I keep saving the WinRK installer from my antivirus software.

trevormcneal 5y ago

Don't listen to peasants, use RAR

CRConrad 5y ago
> Don't listen to peasants Is this to be read as a Czarist "Who cares about those mushiks?" or as a Stalinist "They're all kulaks anyway!" ?

crispyambulance 5y ago

I've used winRAR for a long time because of the "self-extracting executable" feature. You can set it up to create an exe (instead of a rar) that extracts files to a particular location and then runs arbitrary commands. It's like a super simple ghetto-fabulous installer and it just works. Now I wonder what else can do that as easily in a windows environment? I haven't looked around because I haven't needed to but now I am curious. And yes, the winRAR UI is getting a bit long in the tooth.

Horba 5y ago
You can have that with updates using Squirrel; https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows.
Calavar 5y ago
Inno Setup (https://jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php https://jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php). Probably not quite as easy as WinRAR, but close. It comes with an IDE with a point and click wizard for simple installers (i.e. just copy files from A to B).
lifthrasiir 5y ago
7-zip also supports SFX archives. Its implementation also supports a post-decompression command, which is to my knowledge not yet implemented in the 7-zip UI but you can write a small batch file to make one.

Cloudef 5y ago

The worst part of rar (and zip) is that they don't specify filename encoding so you'll end up with a encoding hell.

pabs3 5y ago

There is open source support for RAR in unar: https://theunarchiver.com/command-line https://theunarchiver.com/command-line

cesarb 5y ago
I've encountered RAR files unar cannot open. It seems there are several versions of the RAR format, and unar only understands the older ones.
- pabs3 5y ago
  Hmm, I thought unar supported the latest versions, while the open source version of unrar was the one that didn't support the latest versions.

pmichaud 5y ago

I’m not fully convinced of my own position here, but I have long suspected that “zipping” at all is an abstraction that shouldn’t really be exposed to the user. Like it’s a throwback to an earlier era. The basic trade off is size for speed, and it seems like most cases it could handled automatically at the level of the file system maybe. Like if I have a big file that I want to send, it sort of feels like the software I use to send it should do the work of preparing it for transport to the target system. Similarly, if there are files that aren’t being touched very often shouldn’t the file system figure out that file can be in “small, slow” mode? Or maybe if I know a particular file should be always fast or always small, I should have the option in the file properties for it to be Automatic, Always Small, or Always Fast, like a toggle right near the permissions controls. But not like a separate program that generates separate, smaller, slower files of a special type. Why can’t folders be automatically treated like singular archives when I try to do operations on them for which that makes sense? Why do I have to think about these details? I’m probably missing some important use cases and archiving features, but maybe those can be broken out from the default of “do the obvious thing automatically.”

mavhc 5y ago
Folders can be compressed archive files with the right OS/fake filesystem combination, although that's mostly ease of use. The main 2 reasons for an archive file are giving to someone else, or compression. The FS can do compression these days, so it's mostly about giving 1 file to someone else, not 1000. Using archive files to avoid excess file wastage seems like a bad idea, make the FS better instead
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
> Why can’t folders be automatically treated like singular archives when I try to do operations on them for which that makes sense? Why do I have to think about these details? Operating systems do blur the boundaries of this a bit, now -- you can explore zip files as if they were folders, mount disk images from files, and you can work with folders as bundles (e.g. a macOS application is a disguised bundle, an RTFD document is a directory with contents etc.) Some applications (like mail apps) have always done a good job of handling (combining, compressing) folders so they can be moved/sent as files. The problem is all of these application things are probably best done at a GUI level. At a filesystem/command line level you want the distinction to be explicit. Of course a few OSes ditch the distinction entirely and concern themselves only with objects -- OS/400 for example. Which might be closer to the world you are imagining.

minroot 5y ago

The argument on increasing bandwidths is evil.

hannob 5y ago

FWIW libarchive and its commandline tool bsdtar, which are widely available and often installed by default on Linux hosts, is able to unpack most rar files. Other than that I agree with the post, but if you have a rar file and need to unpack it that's often good to know.

tssva 5y ago
Windows has included libarchive and bsdtar by default starting with the April 2018 Update, so they can also be used there to unpack most rar files.

ksec 5y ago

If you have half decent internet connection, Compressing and Decompressing the files is going to take more time than simply just sending it or downloading it. I still remember we use to compare compression tools and format on compression ratio. But I cant record the last time I care about any of these any more. If it needs to compress just use zip. The same happened to Audio Codec as well. Video Codec is where we still have lots of work. And it is sort of strange RAR comes up, something we used to use everyday and is now for most people completely forgotten.

account42 5y ago
> If you have half decent internet connection, Compressing and Decompressing the files is going to take more time than simply just sending it or downloading it. This might be true for transmitting files 1-to-1 (and even then, for every connection speed slower than memory there is likely a compression algorithm that makes sense) but most files are distributed 1-to-many which is why algorithms like deflate that might be slow to compress but are fast to decompress make sense. For example, Linux distributions would not keep switching between gz, bzip2, xz and now zstd for their packages if the choice was pointless.
- ksec 5y ago
  It is just an observation I have for quite some time. Right now iOS and macOS spend more time decompressing and verifying the update / download than the time it spend to do transfer. I understand not everyone has fast interest, but someday we may want to start optimise for end to end time rather than just downloading time.

nix23 5y ago

Don't use xz or 7-zip...use lzip: https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/safety_of_the_lzip_format.html https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/safety_of_the_lzip_format.html https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/manual/lzip_manual.html#Quality-assurance https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/manual/lzip_manual.html#Quality-... https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html

wackget 5y ago

Oh the irony of recommending formats made by Google and Facebook - two of the largest enemies of the internet.

rcfox 5y ago

One benefit of RAR is when dealing with multi-file archives, you don't need all of the files to be able to decompress one of them. You don't even need a complete file to be able to look inside! Yes, some of your files will be broken if you don't have the entire archive, but at least you can salvage some of your data. Or you can peek in to make sure you've got the right thing before committing to multi-gigabyte downloads.

noAnswer 5y ago
Yes, it is pretty annoying if someone posts a .7z.001 file on usenet. You can't peek inside. You can't even see if it's password protected until you downloaded the whole thing.

kazinator 5y ago

"Furthermore, the small differences in the resulting file size matter less over time as bandwidth is increasing and increasing fast." Firstly, this argument, if true, would add up to: if you're on Windows, don't use anything other than ZIP. The argument is not true, because although increasing storage and communication resources make compression less relevant for small files, there is content which is getting larger because of available bandwidth, including aggregations of smaller content.

abruzzi 5y ago

I have never by choice used rar /or/ 7z. I'm not a heavy user of compression, just the occasional "compress for transport", so to me any savings in file size is an unnoticable rounding error, even 15 years ago. Far more important to me is the simplicity of having tools for compression/decompression built into pretty much any computer that might receive my file, and where the receiver of the file, who may not be technologically adept, knows what it is without me having to explain that it is a compressed file and they neeed to get some tool to decompress it.

KronisLV 5y ago

For all of my compression needs, i usually go for 7-Zip for longer term storage (since while it is noticeably slower than the alternatives, the ratios can be really good for formats that compress well, e.g. anything other than images or videos). I also use ZIP for when i need good compatibility and relatively fast compression (since zip/unzip are easy to use as far as CLIs got and 7-Zip also supports the format, as does whatever my *nix distro at the choice has for a GUI compression program). I sometimes use tar with GZip for when i just want to temporarily compress something to move between servers without worrying about file permissions etc.

jccalhoun 5y ago

Ive been a user of 7-zip for years. I've recently switched to NanaZip which is a fork which works with windows 11 new context menu and adds in some other niceties. https://github.com/M2Team/NanaZip https://github.com/M2Team/NanaZip

kristianpaul 5y ago

Haven't use RAR in ages, i asume was not a popular format anymore.

bombcar 5y ago

If you're using compression, and you have more than one core, you should consider trying pbzip2 - it's parallel http://compression.ca/pbzip2/ http://compression.ca/pbzip2/ 7zip may also do something similar, but it may depend on the archive type it's creating.

Hello71 5y ago
bzip2 is almost always the worst option. it is significantly slower and results in larger output than xz, which is in turn slower and larger than 7zip (lzma2).

kosasbest 5y ago

Interesting that the warez scene adopted RAR as the standard for packaging up pirated works. The alternatives like 7z save more bytes, yet RAR somehow became the winner. Anyone know why?

warmwaffles 5y ago
It's just a part of the scene. Momentum is a hell of a thing to stop in that respect. I don't know if 7zip or any other format will spit out chunked files in 50MB or 100MB part files for "easier" distribution. I say "easier" because it's the poor mans format to send files without using offsets to resume downloads.
VorticonCmdr 5y ago
Most likely because it is older. WinRAR was first released 1995 according to Wikipedia, 7-Zip 1999.
dole 5y ago
RAR's initial release was 1993, 7z's 1999. IIRC, I remembered seeing RAR's in the scene around 1995, 1996 or so. My take: RAR handled splitting to multiple arbitrary-sized volumes more gracefully than ARJ/ARC which were CLI first and never had a Windows GUI that was as nicely polished as WinRAR was. SFVs made error checking and redownloading corrupted volumes easy without relying on the compression format to handle it. ACE just came too late. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(warez) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(warez) Edit: another major use case overlooked here: a considerable amount of media applications will stream files from within a RAR archive without manually unarchiving beforehand, making them more accessible from file storage sites like mega, 1fichier, without carrying the external appearance/negative baggage of an mp4 or mkv.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  > I remembered seeing RAR's in the scene around 1995, 1996 or so. My take: RAR handled splitting to multiple arbitrary-sized volumes more gracefully than ARJ/ARC which were CLI first and never had a Windows GUI that was as nicely polished as WinRAR was. Of course there were still people who screwed that up. I remember downloading some software once that came in the form of a multi-volume RAR, maybe 20 floppy disk-sized RARs. Download all 20 of them, get them in the same directory, then un-rar them, and lo and behold out the other end comes a single .RAR file that was inside! So I un-rar that single RAR, and out the other end comes 20 separate floppy disk images. Obviously the "scene" distributors weren't always the computing world's best and brightest...

joshspankit 5y ago

PeaZip (the GUI app linked in the article) does support [ARJ](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30466484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30466484)...

jandrese 5y ago

Here I thought it was going to be because the RAR tools are all still single threaded and get their pants blown off by anything that can spread the work across the cores on any modern chip.

tediousdemise 5y ago

I'm eagerly awaiting a technological breakthrough in storage that renders compression pointless.

SSLy 5y ago

the only remaining usecase for rar are warez FTP's

phantop 5y ago

I typically don't make use of standard archive formats these days for my own file storage. If I want just pure maximum compression, I'll often use a long-range matcher like FreeArc's srep [1] or lrzip [2] combined with either fast-lzma2 [3] using a p7zip fork [4] for multithreading and fast compression or use mcm [5] or zpaq for max ratio with longer compression time. However, my truly preferred way is using dwarfs [6], which features some really good deduplication and (by default) zstd compression while being mountable. Most of my files are highly compressed and easily accessible without needing to full decompress them. I even made a small script to convert and create AppImages that instead use this [7]. Admittedly, I don't make use of PAR2 or anything of the sort, but I could just do that the traditional way if I so wished. [1]: https://github.com/Phantop/srep https://github.com/Phantop/srep [2]: https://github.com/ckolivas/lrzip https://github.com/ckolivas/lrzip [3]: https://github.com/conor42/fast-lzma2 https://github.com/conor42/fast-lzma2 [4]: https://github.com/jinfeihan57/p7zip https://github.com/jinfeihan57/p7zip [5]: https://github.com/mathieuchartier/mcm https://github.com/mathieuchartier/mcm [6]: https://github.com/mhx/dwarfs/ https://github.com/mhx/dwarfs/ [7]: https://github.com/Phantop/appdwarf/ https://github.com/Phantop/appdwarf/