.ace and WinAce -- which died out fast, and eventually had a nasty security bug in unacev2.dll that caused it to be removed from most 3rd party utilities.
This week I was looking for a book. I couldn't find it at libgen, zlibrary, google with filetype: nor torrent. Fired up aMule, and it had more than 10 sources, downloaded in 30 seconds.
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.
> 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?
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?
In theory, yes. In practice, you will see files in transitional schema in the wild and you need MS Office to work with them, unless they are not just a very basic document.
(I had a similar case in the past, the document contained forms, and it would not render properly even with MS Office for Mac available at the time).
> About psd, yes, that's proprietary. What government agency mandates its use for the public to interact with them? (genuinely asking, not being snarky)
Not aware of G2C, but in other scenarios, it happens.
In our country, public administration is not allowed to use rar either. Only zip, tar, gz, and tar.gz. Despite that, I did receive a rar once; also an Outlook .msg file. Rar was not really a problem, and .msg was solved by communicating with the other side (Mac Outlook cannot open them).
If a government forces it's people to use particular software, it has a duty to provide that software to the entire population. If a parliament decides to pay $X billion to Microsoft, for a lisence for all of UK, well, that sucks, but they can fight over it like they do with all other random spending they do.
If it's not willing to pay the cost, it is basically creating a monopoly for that firm, and I have to pay for it. The potential for lobbying and corruption is off the scale here.
The same people that moan about some software being closed source will come back later crying because said software became a SaaS internet business with monthly fees...
There's nothing wrong with closed source for profit software. I'll never understand why people in this field push to discredit a honest way to earn money from the work they do...
It's as if Medics would cry because other medics are charging them for a medical visit. Dirty medics trying to profit from their knowledge and time!!
> It's as if Medics would cry because other medics are charging them for a medical visit. Dirty medics trying to profit from their knowledge and time!!
No, it's as if one medic told another medic "you're not allowed to use any knowledge you got from my visit to help your patients unless you pay me".
I'll be the one to say it: because a large majority of programmers are liberals, democrats, and anti-capitalist. And they feel everyone else should be too.
> The same people that moan about some software being closed source will come back later crying because said software became a SaaS internet business with monthly fees...
You're saying that in a "Gotcha!" tone, as if you've caught these people out in an inconsistency.
You haven't; there is no such inconsistency. Closed source can be bad even if SaaS is even worse.
7-zip is single-threaded (by default; there are switches you can play with and -mt is not enough), which means, that you are waiting for your stuff to compress, while simultaneously most of your cores are idle.
I don't know what winrar uses, I don't use it; but this is my annoyance with 7zip.
Yes, I mean command line; it is a long time that I used the gui, though I don't think it is updated often.
With command line, I arrived eventually to a set of switches to use, but the -mt option seems to allocate core per file. That means, that if the filesizes of the archived files are not somewhat distributed, it won't work very well. The extreme is, if you have one huge file and few small ones, the small ones will be compressed quickly and you will be still waiting for the huge one to finish with a single core.
And then there are apps that use liblzma underneath. `flatpak build-bundle` can take almost forever.
I don't think I've ever actually used the official build of 7zip on the command line. Only the older p7zip version on Linux.
The p7zip version by default uses all cores and hits 100% on all of them compressing a single file. Perhaps p7zip or my OS has a different set of default options?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> it's probably not binding for reverse engineering based on the open source unrar.
I think the "secret sauce" is the compression-specific code that allows it to reach the high compression ratio which is one of the selling points of the format. Reverse-engineering the decompression code will allow you to create valid RAR files but may not give you any clues as to how to reach the high compression ratio of the original compressor.
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.
Microsoft ASF/WMA also has a similar limitation, where it disallows writing an open source implementation if you use the official format specification.
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.
From the winrar download page you can download the binaries directly without agreeing to any license, which means its clauses wouldn't apply.
It's already been established in the courts that merely using a piece of software does not imply acceptance of licensing terms; the parties must actively agree to it. That's why so many companies push in-your-face agreements that you must actively click "I agree" to.
You can do that anyway, but if you wanted to break the license by distributing modified copies without providing sources, you would fall foul of copyright law.
Yes. The GPL is not a license which dictates how you can use software, such as that you must not read it, or use ideas from it.
EULA restrictions like "no reverse engineering" are not rooted in copyright law, and borrowing ideas is in the realm of patents.
EULA's try to leverage copyright law in order to impose non-copyright restrictions, using the concept that if you violate any of the arbitrary non-copyright restrictions, the thereby violated license lapses, and that license is the document which allows you to have a copy of the software (not the fact that you paid).
I don't fully understand it myself, because if you have a copy of the work (e.g. purchased copy of some proprietary software) the entity which distributed that to you was the copyright-holding purveyor. They did the copying, using their reserved right to do so.
No matter what yo udo with the copyrighted work, if you're not copying it, you're not infringing on copyright. The idea that your right to have a copy can lapse due to violating the EULA has holes in it, because copyright isn't about the right to have a copy, but about the right to produce and redistribute copies.
For instance, on a bit of a tangent here, if you steal a book out of someone's backpack, that is not copyright infringement, and cannot be. You didn't copy anything.
The proprietary EULA wants the law to believe that you're stealing if you continue to use the software after violating the agreement. But without connecting that to the concept of copyright infringement, the accusation has no basis, since you're just using what you paid for it.
Disassembling a binary executable to understand it is exactly the same as reading a book to understand it. Copyright is made for books and such.
This is why people start putting license in a big comment at the top of source files. Also why when I write sites I require the create user call to include a "acceptTosAndLicense" or similar field set to true.
It would probably be possible to argue in court that your compressor isn't technically breaking any laws. But why go through the trouble of using formats which aren't meant to be used, when there are so many good alternatives out there which actually are intentionally freely available?
Once you have fully "re-created the RAR algorithm" you would not need to license the official one anymore. So it's OK, just uninstall RAR from your computer at that point :)
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.
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.
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).
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.
PAR2 can be easily used with any other archive format and any compression algorithm.
For example I am using it with a pax archive format (which unlike tar handles correctly all file metadata, e.g. extended attributes) and with lrzip compression (better for large files, e.g. movies, which do not compress well with more usual algorithms).
I assume that WINRAR may have a simpler interface for inexperienced users, but a knowledgeable user can easily write a pair of simple scripts with all the command-line options needed to combine PAR2 with any archive file format and any compression algorithm and arrange them to be invoked e.g. by right-clicking on a directory or on an archive file.
OS built-in zip handling is extremely limited. You're allowed to create archives and... that's it. You have no control over the compression level or anything else.
And frankly, 7z has terrible ergonomics. Both the UI and the CLI are uncomfortable and ugly.
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?
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
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?
> 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.
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.
>>Does anyone know why RAR is better compression-wise than the two more modern standards?
Because RAR was original compression algorith(I suspect - collection of different algorithms that are applied for different cases) and those two others are based on ONE generic algorithm, which is dumb.
>>It doesn't seem like it's been updated in a long time
Because rar is perfect and what I need. I'm still using RAR files - not interested in 7z and have no idea what is the other standard mentioned. RAR has recovery record, that 7z lacks - when you have archives, that are decades old and moved from one HDD to another, where HDDs develop faults and you need to recover files - that suddently makes difference why rar is still better than 7z, when your files are corrupted in 7z - they are gone.
WINRAR License is least concern for me, because when WinRAR was created, there were different times, when there was an idea, that auhor(and maintainer) should have all the legal rights to his work(and that also includes compensation) - not some company, that is employing talents. Also idea, that your work should be free to everyone was wild idea, when software developers had to pay all the bills and eat as well. Also, closed propiertary sources were historically better for security.
RAR comes from times, when zip was dominating(and it was bad archive) - rar was better at compression than zip and it was quicker to compress and it was also supported on Linux. I have no idea what is 7z doing nowadays, but when it was developed first, it was improving zip, which nobody liked at that time. Also, 7z even nowadays havce some limitations, which requires workarounds, which is time consuming in archive creation. Anyway, none of those arguments for not using RAR seems good enough for me in especially on non open source Windows environment. The only reason for me to stop using RAR would be if Windows had access to RAR (open) source.
> WINRAR License is least concern for me, because when WinRAR was created, there were different times, when there was an idea, that auhor(and maintainer) should have all the legal rights to his work(and that also includes compensation) - not some company, that is employing talents.
The rights to WinRAR are held by a company, not an individual.
> Also, closed propiertary sources were historically better for security.
This is not true and was never true.
> Also, 7z even nowadays havce some limitations, which requires workarounds, which is time consuming in archive creation.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
There is no world in which LZMA2 decompression can be considered “quite fast.” It’s decompression speed bears no resemblance to that of other LZ algorithms like LZ4 (which is definitely fast).
Distributions have stopped using xz/lzma in favor of slightly inferior (size-wise) alternatives due to the time and memory decompression requirements of lzma.
> I think newer versions of tar already have support for Zstd.
You don't really need to have support for a particular compression fromat in the tar command since the tar format does not support compression at all and instead the output of tar is passed through a compressor such as gzip or xz that has its own encapsulation format. All the support in tar does is add switch to start that (de)compressor for you and, for GNU tar, to detect it based on the file extensions.
a tar.something is just a tar archive passed through a compression filter like zstd or gzip. Anyway, tar needs metadata extensions in order to allow random access; most tarballs you'll find don't. So you need to read 5TB of data to find the file at point 5TB in an archive of size 10TB. Which is why as a general purpose archiving format, tar needs to be applied to use cases where it works. It gets old really quick if you don't have random access and random access requirements, plus, remediated by SSDs these days for a bit, it's really time consuming.
You won't be able to do that with RAR files either. The only archive/compression format that you can send anyone is ZIP, since both Windows and macOS can open them ootb.
I wouldn't send a RAR to my grandparents, but if I had to send pictures for a school reunion I would expect everyone to either know how to open a RAR or to be able to figure it out. Worst case they will google rar and will find WinRAR as the first result.
For zstd or brotli I can't even name a GUI program able to open them outside a somewhat obscure 7zip fork.
Or if your friends all have WinZip and can tolerate .zipx (which is a file extension for later and thus less interoperable version of ZIP), it does support JPEG recompression so it can be actually better than RAR.
No, JPEG recompression I meant is not lossy here; it is essentially taking the internal JPEG data structure and losslessly compressing them in more modern techniques. If you want there is also an open source algorithm [1] developed and used by Dropbox.
Ok, bad example, imagine I would be sending you ... text files or something. The point I was trying to make was how viable it is, not how useful it is.
If you sent me a RAR, I'd remind you that it's the 21st century, we all have really fast Internet these days compared to the 90s when RAR was released, and I really don't want to have to install a new piece of software just to open your photos.
(The best bit is that the official WinRAR Linux distribution is a .tar.gz)
Just use ZIP unless your classmates are working solely via tethered 2G connections in Tierra Del Fuego.
Except that... non ascii character filename went wrong all the time. Because zip did not enforce a charset. A rar or 7z won't mess up your filename in any case in contrast to zip.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Par2 is always an option, and RAR implements Reed-Solomon error correcting codes and there are many recent implementations of those: https://github.com/klauspost/reedsolomon.
I'm sure there is a public algorithm / implementation. My question here is: is there an existing archive format (like .7z) that integrates it to the archive format and knows to update the error-correction data on archive update? Maybe not in a way that is as user-friendly as RAR, but "halfway there".
Or are you suggesting all my .7z files should come with a sibling .par2, that I must remember to regenerate after every change of the .7z ? I know I was asking here about "Usability-aside alternatives", but that alternative seems quite inconvenient and below the bar I was ready to accept when asking for less-user-friendly stuff.
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.
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.
It’s gzip that caused your issue, not tar. The lack of index in tar is actually a strength for surviving corruption, as there are no critical areas, ie you can lose any parts of a tar archive and recover useful data from the rest
Tar.gz and tar.xz should never have been made a thing or become so popular, the only safe options are tar, tar.lz and to an extent tar.bz2
No, the major problem of tar is 'it is not indexable'. In any case, browse a tar means you need to scan the whole achieve to locate all files and generate the entry list. And of course it get slower when the files are a lot or archive is big. This is a format even worse than zip.(Zip do have a central record section)
And it also suffer the same problem from zip: the charset is undefined. Because they are older then the time utf-8 being the universal standard. Which means it mess up when two systems are in different charset and software is not smart enough to guess it.
These problems are all addressed in later format(rar/7z). Newer archive format most enforcing utf-8 charset. So you won't have a problem that file name suddenly turn into garbage for no reason.
It's probably the worst format you can chose if you need to distribute a file instead using it as a pack/extract on local only format(not even browse).
Technically speaking, TAR is indexable -- the index is distributed through the archive, at the head of each file. So long as the TAR is uncompressed, you can skip from one header to the next by reading the size of each file. It ends up looking like a bunch of random I/O, but it's manageable. (The headers are even sector-aligned!)
The problem arises when the TAR is compressed with a stream compressor (as most are). Since stream compression formats generally aren't seekable, there's no way to read each header without uncompressing the rest of the file in the process.
> And it also suffer the same problem from zip: the charset is undefined. Newer archive format most enforcing utf-8 charset.
On the flip side, this means that those archive formats can't archive the contents of a filesystem which contains inconsistently encoded (or flat-out nonsense) filenames.
So long as filesystems haven't "solved" the encoding problem, I wouldn't fault an archive format for behaving similarly.
> Technically speaking, TAR is indexable -- the index is distributed through the archive, at the head of each file.
Actually, zip works in the same way as tar. So the central dict is locate at the end of file because it can only be decided after all works finished.
And zip actually struct the first part of file with file info before every block in layout similar to tar, so stream decoding is possible. (Although it IS a violation of specification to decode file based on per file info instead of central record in zip standard)
> On the flip side, this means that those archive formats can't archive the contents of a filesystem which contains inconsistently encoded (or flat-out nonsense) filenames.
It is a good thing IMO because you can't contribute to the problem more now (at the price not able to backup already screwed up disks. Well..., at least old format(tar) still works on old disk)
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.
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.
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.
Some compression formats are actually designed for data archival and compression. Rar is one such format. One of the early use cases was data archival onto long term storage mediums such as tape. As such, it has built in parity which means you can recover partially corrupted archives. It can also do things like split the archive up over many smaller files. Again, because this sort of thing was needed for backing up to tape, floppy, etc in the late 90s/early 2ks.
You can use an par2 file for that though. Yes, might be less convenient than having it built into the archive in some cases but on the other hand you can a) only download the .par2 file if you need it and b) use it to add error correction to files without putting them in an archive so you can access them directly and c) you can create the error correction information across multiple archives if you want.
the dropbox joke is that nobody would use dropbox, which is obviously false in hindsight. but nobody is claiming that nobody uses rar, but instead that nobody should use rar. the same argument is valid of dropbox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Dropbox.
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.
Inno Setup (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).
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.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadI mainly hit that one when downloading .MOD music.
(Edit, huh, .ZOO was based on LSW, so maybe I'm conflating the two)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinAce
https://www.reddit.com/r/PaidForWinRAR/
:)
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.
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?
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?
About psd, yes, that's proprietary. What government agency mandates its use for the public to interact with them? (genuinely asking, not being snarky)
In theory, yes. In practice, you will see files in transitional schema in the wild and you need MS Office to work with them, unless they are not just a very basic document.
(I had a similar case in the past, the document contained forms, and it would not render properly even with MS Office for Mac available at the time).
> About psd, yes, that's proprietary. What government agency mandates its use for the public to interact with them? (genuinely asking, not being snarky)
Not aware of G2C, but in other scenarios, it happens.
In our country, public administration is not allowed to use rar either. Only zip, tar, gz, and tar.gz. Despite that, I did receive a rar once; also an Outlook .msg file. Rar was not really a problem, and .msg was solved by communicating with the other side (Mac Outlook cannot open them).
If it's not willing to pay the cost, it is basically creating a monopoly for that firm, and I have to pay for it. The potential for lobbying and corruption is off the scale here.
For an extreme example, see South Korea and their ActiveX problem.
There's nothing wrong with closed source for profit software. I'll never understand why people in this field push to discredit a honest way to earn money from the work they do...
It's as if Medics would cry because other medics are charging them for a medical visit. Dirty medics trying to profit from their knowledge and time!!
No, it's as if one medic told another medic "you're not allowed to use any knowledge you got from my visit to help your patients unless you pay me".
You're saying that in a "Gotcha!" tone, as if you've caught these people out in an inconsistency.
You haven't; there is no such inconsistency. Closed source can be bad even if SaaS is even worse.
I don't know what winrar uses, I don't use it; but this is my annoyance with 7zip.
Zip format also defaults threads to number of CPUs, but only hit 30% CPU (over 16 threads) on some test data.
With command line, I arrived eventually to a set of switches to use, but the -mt option seems to allocate core per file. That means, that if the filesizes of the archived files are not somewhat distributed, it won't work very well. The extreme is, if you have one huge file and few small ones, the small ones will be compressed quickly and you will be still waiting for the huge one to finish with a single core.
And then there are apps that use liblzma underneath. `flatpak build-bundle` can take almost forever.
The p7zip version by default uses all cores and hits 100% on all of them compressing a single file. Perhaps p7zip or my OS has a different set of default options?
this can't be true in solid archive mode, which should almost always be used (otherwise you might as well use zip). also:
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'.
Also WinRAR is a closed source Russian software.
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.
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.
I think the "secret sauce" is the compression-specific code that allows it to reach the high compression ratio which is one of the selling points of the format. Reverse-engineering the decompression code will allow you to create valid RAR files but may not give you any clues as to how to reach the high compression ratio of the original 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.
Luckily it is too mostly irrelevant nowadays.
Doesn't mean it would in court.
It's already been established in the courts that merely using a piece of software does not imply acceptance of licensing terms; the parties must actively agree to it. That's why so many companies push in-your-face agreements that you must actively click "I agree" to.
EULA restrictions like "no reverse engineering" are not rooted in copyright law, and borrowing ideas is in the realm of patents.
EULA's try to leverage copyright law in order to impose non-copyright restrictions, using the concept that if you violate any of the arbitrary non-copyright restrictions, the thereby violated license lapses, and that license is the document which allows you to have a copy of the software (not the fact that you paid).
No matter what yo udo with the copyrighted work, if you're not copying it, you're not infringing on copyright. The idea that your right to have a copy can lapse due to violating the EULA has holes in it, because copyright isn't about the right to have a copy, but about the right to produce and redistribute copies.
For instance, on a bit of a tangent here, if you steal a book out of someone's backpack, that is not copyright infringement, and cannot be. You didn't copy anything.
The proprietary EULA wants the law to believe that you're stealing if you continue to use the software after violating the agreement. But without connecting that to the concept of copyright infringement, the accusation has no basis, since you're just using what you paid for it.
Disassembling a binary executable to understand it is exactly the same as reading a book to understand it. Copyright is made for books and such.
It depends on dictionary size, word size, the actual data etc.
A bunch of compression formats do that. Even zip files can, which leads to interesting tricks like:
https://www.bamsoftware.com/hacks/zipbomb/
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).
It lasted only for a while. Gmail drops such files entirely for the last few years.
For example I am using it with a pax archive format (which unlike tar handles correctly all file metadata, e.g. extended attributes) and with lrzip compression (better for large files, e.g. movies, which do not compress well with more usual algorithms).
I assume that WINRAR may have a simpler interface for inexperienced users, but a knowledgeable user can easily write a pair of simple scripts with all the command-line options needed to combine PAR2 with any archive file format and any compression algorithm and arrange them to be invoked e.g. by right-clicking on a directory or on an archive file.
No it's not, lzip is it and war, as written by archive.org and the European-IT-department
And frankly, 7z has terrible ergonomics. Both the UI and the CLI are uncomfortable and ugly.
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?
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
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?
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.
It is actively maintained. https://www.rarlab.com/rarnew.htm A view years ago, with rar5, it got a modernised file-format.
My memory might be bad on this, but UHARC niche was media files, while rar was good tool for everything.
Because RAR was original compression algorith(I suspect - collection of different algorithms that are applied for different cases) and those two others are based on ONE generic algorithm, which is dumb.
>>It doesn't seem like it's been updated in a long time
Because rar is perfect and what I need. I'm still using RAR files - not interested in 7z and have no idea what is the other standard mentioned. RAR has recovery record, that 7z lacks - when you have archives, that are decades old and moved from one HDD to another, where HDDs develop faults and you need to recover files - that suddently makes difference why rar is still better than 7z, when your files are corrupted in 7z - they are gone.
WINRAR License is least concern for me, because when WinRAR was created, there were different times, when there was an idea, that auhor(and maintainer) should have all the legal rights to his work(and that also includes compensation) - not some company, that is employing talents. Also idea, that your work should be free to everyone was wild idea, when software developers had to pay all the bills and eat as well. Also, closed propiertary sources were historically better for security.
RAR comes from times, when zip was dominating(and it was bad archive) - rar was better at compression than zip and it was quicker to compress and it was also supported on Linux. I have no idea what is 7z doing nowadays, but when it was developed first, it was improving zip, which nobody liked at that time. Also, 7z even nowadays havce some limitations, which requires workarounds, which is time consuming in archive creation. Anyway, none of those arguments for not using RAR seems good enough for me in especially on non open source Windows environment. The only reason for me to stop using RAR would be if Windows had access to RAR (open) source.
The rights to WinRAR are held by a company, not an individual.
> Also, closed propiertary sources were historically better for security.
This is not true and was never true.
> Also, 7z even nowadays havce some limitations, which requires workarounds, which is time consuming in archive creation.
Like what?
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).
https://www.opencpu.org/posts/brotli-benchmarks/
Distributions have stopped using xz/lzma in favor of slightly inferior (size-wise) alternatives due to the time and memory decompression requirements of lzma.
You don't really need to have support for a particular compression fromat in the tar command since the tar format does not support compression at all and instead the output of tar is passed through a compressor such as gzip or xz that has its own encapsulation format. All the support in tar does is add switch to start that (de)compressor for you and, for GNU tar, to detect it based on the file extensions.
For zstd or brotli I can't even name a GUI program able to open them outside a somewhat obscure 7zip fork.
[1] https://github.com/dropbox/lepton
If sending gigabytes of text please use lzip ;)
I had to look up lzip.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lzip#Application
https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html
https://parltrack.org/dumps
(The best bit is that the official WinRAR Linux distribution is a .tar.gz)
Just use ZIP unless your classmates are working solely via tethered 2G connections in Tierra Del Fuego.
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-oauth-rar
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.)
I’d rather pay $29 for a lifetime license than have any chance at giving more data about me to Google or Facebook.
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.
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.
NTFS does not have nanoseconds precision, only 100-nanoseconds aka FILETIME.
That has been a great killer feature for me over the years.
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.
> 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.
It's like RAID1 vs RAID5, only without the speed bonus of RAID1.
To me it's a case of “why not both?”, and I remain interested in software free RAR alternatives with a RecoveryRecord-ish feature.
Or are you suggesting all my .7z files should come with a sibling .par2, that I must remember to regenerate after every change of the .7z ? I know I was asking here about "Usability-aside alternatives", but that alternative seems quite inconvenient and below the bar I was ready to accept when asking for less-user-friendly stuff.
- As usually, the Arch wiki has an excellent page on the topic: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Parchive
- Hey, par3 is in the works: https://github.com/Parchive/par3cmdline/issues/1
- I created [Feature request / par2create] Option to regenerate par2 files if input file changed : https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline/issues/170
Had to double check that. I would have sworn those codes were called Solomon-Reed, not Reed-Solomon. Guess I have my little Mandela Effect now!
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.
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.
Tar.gz and tar.xz should never have been made a thing or become so popular, the only safe options are tar, tar.lz and to an extent tar.bz2
And it also suffer the same problem from zip: the charset is undefined. Because they are older then the time utf-8 being the universal standard. Which means it mess up when two systems are in different charset and software is not smart enough to guess it.
These problems are all addressed in later format(rar/7z). Newer archive format most enforcing utf-8 charset. So you won't have a problem that file name suddenly turn into garbage for no reason.
It's probably the worst format you can chose if you need to distribute a file instead using it as a pack/extract on local only format(not even browse).
The problem arises when the TAR is compressed with a stream compressor (as most are). Since stream compression formats generally aren't seekable, there's no way to read each header without uncompressing the rest of the file in the process.
> And it also suffer the same problem from zip: the charset is undefined. Newer archive format most enforcing utf-8 charset.
On the flip side, this means that those archive formats can't archive the contents of a filesystem which contains inconsistently encoded (or flat-out nonsense) filenames.
So long as filesystems haven't "solved" the encoding problem, I wouldn't fault an archive format for behaving similarly.
Actually, zip works in the same way as tar. So the central dict is locate at the end of file because it can only be decided after all works finished.
And zip actually struct the first part of file with file info before every block in layout similar to tar, so stream decoding is possible. (Although it IS a violation of specification to decode file based on per file info instead of central record in zip standard)
> On the flip side, this means that those archive formats can't archive the contents of a filesystem which contains inconsistently encoded (or flat-out nonsense) filenames.
It is a good thing IMO because you can't contribute to the problem more now (at the price not able to backup already screwed up disks. Well..., at least old format(tar) still works on old disk)
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.
- 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.
Are there other archival formats on par with RAR without the licensing voodoo I see people mentioning?
I don't think you'll get why having all in a simple to use solution is superior for several of us.
Jar is just a ZIP. ISO's can be mounted under Unix.
> - 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.
Any software does that since... Amiga days?
>- Splitting files, locked archives, AES protection, SFX, and other features are easily accessible.
Splitting exists since forever.
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.