#Buying winrar zip file#
This can be more convenient than WinZip’s disk spanning, which lets a ZIP file span multiple disks but requires you to create the file on the removable disk and feed additional disks as each one fills up. This lets you create a RAR file in pre-defined size chunks to fit a 1.44MB floppy, ZIP 100 disc, or a 650 or 700MB-formatted CD-R. If you often work with very large compressed files that span multiple disks, you’ll appreciate WinRAR’s ability to create multi-volume archives. WinRAR also provides a useful – and powerful – find feature that can search for particular files as well as for text strings within archive files. WinRAR offers a combination of context menus and integration with e-mail clients that makes it a matter of a few mouse clicks to compress files and send them to a recipient, all without the need to open multiple applications. WinRAR also offers multiple levels of compression that strike a balance between minimizing compression time and minimizing file size. Using a test folder consisting of 202 MB of mixed data, WinRAR compressed the information into a 134 MB file, while the WinZip-ZIPped file was a much larger 184 MB. We found this to essentially be the case. To go up against the enormous popularity of an entrenched format like ZIP, RAR claims better compression than ZIP (though it does concede that ZIP files typically compress faster). Not surprisingly, WinRAR’s default compression format is RAR but can be changed to ZIP. Suffice it to say that if WinRAR doesn’t support it, it probably doesn’t exist. The program can unpack no fewer than 14 file compression types, including the eponymous RAR and the ubiquitous ZIP, as well open-source mainstays like TAR, CAB files - the staple of Windows OS distributions - and even ISO9660 CD image files. The list of compression formats supported by WinRAR is indeed substantial. The following is a review of its basic features. WinRAR is a powerful file archiver and manager.