Download WinRAR File Archive & Compressing Tool for Free

WinRAR is a Windows version of the RAR archiver – a powerful tool that allows you to create, manage and control archive files. There are several versions of RAR, for a number of operating systems: Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X.

WinRAR is able to create archives in two different formats: RAR and ZIP. Both formats are able to handle files of practically unlimited size. Here is a comparison of these formats:

RAR Archives:

Typically RAR format provides better compression than ZIP, especially in the solid mode. WinRAR multi-volume archives in RAR format allow more functions like self-extracting volumes.

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

ZIP Archives:

The main advantage of the ZIP format is its popularity. For example, most archives on the web are ZIP archives.
So if you are going to send an archive to somebody, but you are not sure that your addressee has WinRAR to extract the archive contents, it might be a good idea to use the ZIP format.

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

The internal format of RAR and ZIP archives created by WinRAR allows storing practically any number of files of practically any size. Actual limits depend on the file system and available memory.

Some older file systems do not support files larger than 4 GB. Also please take into account that 32-bit WinRAR cannot use more than 2 GB of memory. If you need to process a lot of files or use large dictionaries, 64-bit WinRAR may be preferable.

It may be used in one of two ways: in graphical shell mode with a standard Windows interface or in command line mode. It is also possible to add files, to an existing RAR archive, using drag-and-drop.

Also: Download WinZip File Archiver for Windows PC

Select the desired archive in the window and press Enter on its name. RAR will read the archive and display its contents. You may now add files to the archive by simply dragging them from another program and dropping them into WinRAR.

WinRAR Key Features:

• It introduces an original compression algorithm. It provides a high compression ratio on executable files, object libraries, large text files, etc.

• Internally RAR format does not limit archive and file sizes also as the number of files in the archive. These values may be limited by file and operating systems also as by available memory.

• It provides complete support for RAR and ZIP 2.0 archives and is able to unpack 7Z, ACE, ARJ, BZ2, CAB, GZ, ISO, JAR, LZH, TAR, UUE, XZ, and Z archives.

• It offers both a classic interactive Windows interface and the command line interface.

• It also provides functionality for creating a ‘solid’ archive, which can raise the compression ratio by 10% – 50% over more common methods, particularly when packing large numbers of small files.

• Win Rar offers the ability to create customizable SFX archives.

• Win RAR offers the ability to create a multi-volume archive as SFX.

• Optional recovery record allows for protecting archives from damage.

Also Check: How to Split Large Zip Files into Multiple Parts using Winrar?