Comments on: Why I do not use RAR

By: Janis

Janis — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 17:08:00 +0000

It's propiertary, yeah, but there are RAR extractors available for pretty much any OS, and they're not all command-line tools. 7z is good, but it's interface isn't as well-designed (this is of course entirely IMHO). I still use RAR for most of my archiving tasks.

By: arsenalist

arsenalist — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 11:46:53 +0000

3 and 4 are valid points.

By: alias

alias — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 17:47:20 +0000

despite explicitly stating it yourself, you seem to be missing an important point : RAR is NOT merely a packer, it’s an ARCHIVER. you’ve no idea how many times RAR saved me from data loss in the past. recovery record + multi-volume support + recovery volumes mechanisms all built into the packer just can’t be beat. badly scratched cds/dvds, bad clusters on hdd, partition magic (et al) getting its knickers in a twist during partition resize and losing some sectors’ contents in the process – you name it, RAR was always there for me.

in case you haven’t noticed, windoze has the annoying tendency to not let you copy/move files unless it can read the ENTIRE file. there are tools to overcome this issue, but they’re payware and don’t always have them on you. so, all my backups are multi-volume RARs with recovery record and several recovery volumes, usually residing on dcs/dvds. unless the media gets REALLY-REALLY fubar, i’ve near perfect chance of recovering my data. until zip/7z/bzip2/whatever can provide my with an equivalent set of BUILT IN recovery features, RAR’s the only thing i count on. and, lets face it, it’s dirt cheap at that.

By: Carsten

Carsten — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 07:02:16 +0000

Main reason people nowdays use RAR is to bypass filters in Exchange, etc.

This works equally well with 7-zip of course, but many people know to unrar while files with a .7z usually provokes a question what this is.