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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

.7z gets way better compression than .zip, in my experience. Plus, 7-zip can handle the odd archive here and there that I'm forced to download on my corporate PC that Windows cannot. Like a tarball.

Finally, the built-in integrity hashing that 7-zip adds to the right-click context menu in Windows is crazy useful.

So to answer your question: there are plenty of legitimate reasons to still use 7zip. I can't think of any legitimate reasons to still use WinRAR, though...

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One advantage of WinRAR over 7-Zip is the option to add recovery data and data parity recovery files. This can of course be accomplished on any file using PAR2 but it saved a step which some people liked. Not everyone needs this option. I create PAR files when I back up important archives to multiple external drives. par2cmdline [1] is in some Linux repositories.

[1] - https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline [In need of a new maintainer]

I may be wrong, but rar files appear to be recoverable when the download has not finished, but last time I tried I could not do anything with a partial 7z archive.

MultiPar is the continuation for Windows https://github.com/Yutaka-Sawada/MultiPar

And this for Linux https://github.com/animetosho/par2cmdline-turbo

WinRAR can _create_ RAR files. In fact it's one of the only pieces of software that can. The decompression algo is free, so it's implemented in 7zip. compressing files in the format is what they want you to pay for.

Sure...but in this day and age I almost consider .rar a "read-only" format. There will be plenty of RAR archives that people are keeping around for historical reasons, but, why would you still be creating WinRAR archives when there are better options?

On Usenet RAR/PAR is still the standard

Hopefully that slowly stops being the standard: https://github.com/animetosho/Nyuu/wiki/Stop-RAR-Uploads

Probably not, if the releases come from scene groups they follow the standard.

If you search up guides on how to upload to Usenet, you'll often find most of the recommend creating split RARs.

Uploaders who just transfer scene releases without bothering to extract will of course stick to RAR, but there's a lot of content these days that isn't from scene groups.

> there are better options?

which are?..

If you need the interop then you can't beat ZIP

If you need a built-in recovery record (and find a working decompressing program 10-20 years later) then you can't beat RAR

If your corporate is insane and forbids 7z because it's FOSS/made by Russian then you can't beat RAR

Which are those 'better options'?

tar? XD

Your corporate should look up who makes WinRar.

Thanks, I know who and where from Eugene is.

> The decompression algo is free

Is the algorithm itself actually available somewhere? IIRC 7zip had compatibility issues with some RAR files out there that opens up just fine with WinRAR, so I assumed they had to figure out the algo themselves.

>Is the algorithm itself actually available somewhere?

https://www.rarlab.com/rar_add.htm

The source has the following restriction:

      UnRAR source code may be used in any software to handle
      RAR archives without limitations free of charge, but cannot be
      used to develop RAR (WinRAR) compatible archiver and to
      re-create RAR compression algorithm, which is proprietary.
      Distribution of modified UnRAR source code in separate form
      or as a part of other software is permitted, provided that
      full text of this paragraph, starting from "UnRAR source code"
      words, is included in license, or in documentation if license
      is not available, and in source code comments of resulting package.

> Finally, the built-in integrity hashing that 7-zip adds to the right-click context menu in Windows is crazy useful.

Ironic, isn't 7-Zip the program where the developer has famously refused to provide download hashes or digital signatures of the release binaries?

Interesting, never heard tarballs being classified as odd before. They are still widely used.

If it's something you intend to package to a non-Windows user then sure it's not odd. I send file archives to non-tech users all the time internally. I absolutely do not tarball them, I zip them. When it comes to less tech savvy users, a tarball is definitely an odd format to deal with.

If you're a non-developer Windows user, you won't encounter a tarball in the wild very often. I think I first ran into one when I wanted an emulator in the early aughts (as a teenager) and found it on Sourceforge.

My immediate thoughts were, "What the hell is this?" and "Why didn't they just give me an EXE?"

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