Comment by Ayesh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ayesh | Hacker News Reader

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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.

Most of these, if no all, is covered by 7-zip.

7z does not offer archive recovery. This has saved my archived data couple of times, which would be gone, if I was using 7z.

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.

This sounds sooo much like that "dropbox? Just use rsync" comment.

I don't think you'll get why having all in a simple to use solution is superior for several of us.

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'm not familiar with compression very much, what's the difference between what 7z does versus "archive recovery"? Thanks

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.

> It can also do things like split the archive up over many smaller files.

Are there other archival formats on par with RAR without the licensing voodoo I see people mentioning?

You'd need to use a tool like par2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive) on top of a 7z file to get a recovery record.

Winrar save extra information to the compressed file. So in case your .rar file damage, it can be recovered.

>- WinRAR supports various formats such as ISO, JAR, and a few typical zip-ish formats.

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.

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