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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

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.
    - thiht 5y ago
      zstd and brotli are not products though, they’re just components that have been open sourced (BSD/LGPL2, and MIT respectively). The fact they’re from Facebook/Google is irrelevant here. You do not support or endorse Facebook/Google because you use zstd/brotli.
    - programmer_dude 5y ago
      Google/Facebook aren't getting paid for these products. You are not supporting them by just using their compression tools.
account42 5y ago
> From nanoseconds precision (with NTFS) NTFS does not have nanoseconds precision, only 100-nanoseconds aka FILETIME.
xtracto 5y ago
RAR is the only archive/compression format that can include a PAR2 like recovery record. You can even configure what % of the size to dedicate for that. That has been a great killer feature for me over the years.
- ronjouch 5y ago
  Confirming this, and confirming that the recovery record (that I had set to a hefty 10%, I think, because the data was important to me) did let me recover archives that suffered physical media damage, which would have been irrecoverable had I used something else. I wish 7zip had this feature. This was one of the most satisfying progress bars: from "your data is dead" to a few minutes later "Successfully recovered full data from recovery record" :))))) I anticipate passerbys might say "but you can do the same with TAR + xyz + abc". To this I’ll reply: 1. The nice thing about RAR is that this recovery feature has been built-in and extremely easy to use, since the 90s. 2. Usability nit aside, I'd love to hear about alternatives.
  - computator 5y ago
    > let me recover archives that suffered physical media damage > Usability nit aside, I'd love to hear about alternatives. Make two or more copies on different media. Sure, RAR or another archiver can save you from partial media damage but nothing saves you from total media damage other than having completely separate backups.
    - nine_k 5y ago
      Two copies is 200%, the redundancy records are normally below 110%. It's like RAID1 vs RAID5, only without the speed bonus of RAID1.
      - ronjouch 5y ago
        Yeah. They have a point, though, more copies is good too. To me it's a case of “why not both?”, and I remain interested in software free RAR alternatives with a RecoveryRecord-ish feature.
anthk 5y ago
Unix users will just use TAR/PAX for that and then compress the package. Much better.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
I think for the common use case of distributing giga bytes of data in a reasonably efficient way, 7zip is fine (e.g. simheaven.com uses that for huge scenery downloads). Where things get tricky is splitting the resulting archive in multiple files. This used to be common with rar and I think 7zip also supports this. That is convenient when downloading over a slow/unstable connection (or if you don't know how to resume an aborted download with wget or ftp). Less of an issue these days but of course browsers don't support this. With zip files this also used to be a thing that some tools supported. I'm old enough to remember PKZip being a new thing :-). For as an actual backup format, tar is a common alternative. I'd probably use tar with bzip2, 7zip, or even gzip compression. It supports a few more compression algorithms of course. The main downside is that tar files are less common on windows and the whole double file extension thing confuses people with file managers that hide them (i.e. most users on windows or mac). Of course most of the archive/zip ui tools out there would support tar files anyway. Where it gets weird of course is with things like file permissions and other linux specific stuff like user and group ids. It's the reason zip is so popular, it doesn't support that at all. Tar is a bit over engineered for the simple use cases.
- noAnswer 5y ago
  The reason I'm a RAR fan is because TAR failed me multiple times! (The first one was ~21 years ago. I lost most of my home.tar.gz-Backup. Because tar has no index, if something bad comes along, everything after that can't be read.) 17 years ago, I took a deep dive into rar and replaced my tar.gz backup process with it. I had a cronjob that checked the tar.gz-Backups from the past week and there was a 50% change of "Unexpected EOF in archive". There where weeks, when all seven archives had and error! Disk, NFS, USB-Stick didn't mater. Also I wanted encryption. Which means another pipe. I have also seen bit flips on USB-Sticks. Where a copied jpg had reversed colours in the middle. So I wanted redundancy too. RAR has everything included, and I felt it had a low bus factor. Time moves on. 7zip feature creeps towards rar. Most if not all consumer OSs can open and create .zip out of the box. So, who cares ;-) Even I use Borg for my backups these days, since I don't have to care about a bus factor any more. RAR is still cool and my 17 year old licence is still valid.
  - 5y ago

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.
  - thiht 5y ago
    zstd and brotli are not products though, they’re just components that have been open sourced (BSD/LGPL2, and MIT respectively). The fact they’re from Facebook/Google is irrelevant here. You do not support or endorse Facebook/Google because you use zstd/brotli.
  - programmer_dude 5y ago
    Google/Facebook aren't getting paid for these products. You are not supporting them by just using their compression tools.

account42 5y ago

> From nanoseconds precision (with NTFS) NTFS does not have nanoseconds precision, only 100-nanoseconds aka FILETIME.

xtracto 5y ago

RAR is the only archive/compression format that can include a PAR2 like recovery record. You can even configure what % of the size to dedicate for that. That has been a great killer feature for me over the years.

ronjouch 5y ago
Confirming this, and confirming that the recovery record (that I had set to a hefty 10%, I think, because the data was important to me) did let me recover archives that suffered physical media damage, which would have been irrecoverable had I used something else. I wish 7zip had this feature. This was one of the most satisfying progress bars: from "your data is dead" to a few minutes later "Successfully recovered full data from recovery record" :))))) I anticipate passerbys might say "but you can do the same with TAR + xyz + abc". To this I’ll reply: 1. The nice thing about RAR is that this recovery feature has been built-in and extremely easy to use, since the 90s. 2. Usability nit aside, I'd love to hear about alternatives.
- computator 5y ago
  > let me recover archives that suffered physical media damage > Usability nit aside, I'd love to hear about alternatives. Make two or more copies on different media. Sure, RAR or another archiver can save you from partial media damage but nothing saves you from total media damage other than having completely separate backups.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    Two copies is 200%, the redundancy records are normally below 110%. It's like RAID1 vs RAID5, only without the speed bonus of RAID1.
    - ronjouch 5y ago
      Yeah. They have a point, though, more copies is good too. To me it's a case of “why not both?”, and I remain interested in software free RAR alternatives with a RecoveryRecord-ish feature.

anthk 5y ago

Unix users will just use TAR/PAX for that and then compress the package. Much better.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

I think for the common use case of distributing giga bytes of data in a reasonably efficient way, 7zip is fine (e.g. simheaven.com uses that for huge scenery downloads). Where things get tricky is splitting the resulting archive in multiple files. This used to be common with rar and I think 7zip also supports this. That is convenient when downloading over a slow/unstable connection (or if you don't know how to resume an aborted download with wget or ftp). Less of an issue these days but of course browsers don't support this. With zip files this also used to be a thing that some tools supported. I'm old enough to remember PKZip being a new thing :-). For as an actual backup format, tar is a common alternative. I'd probably use tar with bzip2, 7zip, or even gzip compression. It supports a few more compression algorithms of course. The main downside is that tar files are less common on windows and the whole double file extension thing confuses people with file managers that hide them (i.e. most users on windows or mac). Of course most of the archive/zip ui tools out there would support tar files anyway. Where it gets weird of course is with things like file permissions and other linux specific stuff like user and group ids. It's the reason zip is so popular, it doesn't support that at all. Tar is a bit over engineered for the simple use cases.

noAnswer 5y ago
The reason I'm a RAR fan is because TAR failed me multiple times! (The first one was ~21 years ago. I lost most of my home.tar.gz-Backup. Because tar has no index, if something bad comes along, everything after that can't be read.) 17 years ago, I took a deep dive into rar and replaced my tar.gz backup process with it. I had a cronjob that checked the tar.gz-Backups from the past week and there was a 50% change of "Unexpected EOF in archive". There where weeks, when all seven archives had and error! Disk, NFS, USB-Stick didn't mater. Also I wanted encryption. Which means another pipe. I have also seen bit flips on USB-Sticks. Where a copied jpg had reversed colours in the middle. So I wanted redundancy too. RAR has everything included, and I felt it had a low bus factor. Time moves on. 7zip feature creeps towards rar. Most if not all consumer OSs can open and create .zip out of the box. So, who cares ;-) Even I use Borg for my backups these days, since I don't have to care about a bus factor any more. RAR is still cool and my 17 year old licence is still valid.
- 5y ago