WinRAR is a must-have application that has the ability to replace all the other compression tools, providing support for most compression formats, including RAR, ZIP, CAB, ARJ, LZH, ACE, TAR, GZip, UUE, ISO, BZIP2, Z and 7-Zip.
After many years on the market, it's pretty clear that WinRAR is one of the most useful applications out there, although there are a bunch of developers who tried to steal the lion's share in this particular software segment with some free utilities.
In case you are looking for dedicated tools to secure your files, you can always protect your data with a password, while the “Repair” function comes in handy whenever you try to fix a broken archive.
Besides the fact that it does a great job when it comes to compressing files, WinRAR also integrates dedicated features that allow you to manipulate archives with a single click. You can backup the files you're about to compress, you can test the archived files and you can even scan the archives for viruses before decompressing, without putting the data stored on your computer at risk.
Sure, WinRAR has the same old and boring interface, but that's definitely enough for an application that's selling like hot cakes ever since it reached the Internet.
In our test, the compression and decompression process worked amazingly fast, and that should happen in your case too, at least if your computer is able to handle the task. The only problems you could experience are strictly related to hardware resources, as working with three or four archives at the same time could be a bit overwhelming for slower computers.
What we liked the most was probably its functionality, as this application allows you to handle the most popular compression formats using a single interface, with very high speeds provided by the engine hidden under the hood. The only bad thing is probably its somewhat classic interface, although most people agree that this is basically the best way to allow users get in touch with WinRAR's tens of features.
Limitations:
· The number of files, which can be added to an archive, depends upon the amount of available memory and the length of file names. Roughly 128 bytes of memory are required per archived file for RAR archive. For example, it can take about 128 MB to compress one million of files. WinRAR has been tested to handle over one million of files.
· The size of a RAR archive, as well as the size of any single file within a RAR archive, is limited to 8,589,934,591 GB (9,223,372,036,854,775,807 bytes). Note that to create archives larger than 4 GB, you need to use NTFS, as older file systems do not support such large files.
· The size of a ZIP archive, as well as the size of any single file within a ZIP archive, is limited to 2 GB.
· In general RAR archive format is much better optimized for heavy tasks involving huge number of files and gigabytes of disk space.
· 40 days trial
What's New in This Release:
· "Estimate" function in WinRAR "Info" command is adjusted to faster WinRAR 4.20 compression when calculating the expected compression time
· GUI SFX module -sp switch passes parameters to setup application only if no other parameters were specified in "Setup" command in SFX script. So "Setup" command has a higher priority than -sp
· Regardless of -sp presence, setup application can read the full SFX command line from sfxcmd environment variable
· "Save current settings" button in "Advanced SFX options" dialog is now available only when converting an existing archive to SFX
· Options saved with this button are applied only to convert to SFX operation
· If you create or update SFX archive, only SFX options stored in default compression profile are used. Options saved in "Advanced SFX options" dialog are ignored for these operations