WinRAR is an archiving utility that completely supports RAR and ZIP archives and is able to unpack CAB, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZ, UUE, BZ2, JAR, ISO, 7Z, Z archives. It consistently makes smaller archives than the competition, saving disk space and transmission costs. WinRAR offers you the benefit of industry strength archive encryption using AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) with a key of 128 bits. It supports files and archives up to 8,589 billion gigabytes in size. It also offers the ability to create self extracting and multi volume archives. With recovery record and recovery volumes, you can reconstruct even physically damaged archives.
WinRAR 7.00 release notes:
- Compression dictionary sizes larger than 1 GB are supported for RAR archive format. Depending on the amount of physically available memory, dictionary up to 64 GB can be selected.
- Not power of 2 dictionary sizes can be specified for dictionaries exceeding 4 GB. So we are not limited to 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 series and can use values like 5 GB or 22 GB.
- Archives with dictionaries exceeding 4 GB can be unpacked only by WinRAR 7.0 or newer. 64-bit WinRAR version is needed to unpack archives with dictionaries exceeding 1 GB.
- Increasing the dictionary size can improve the compression ratio for large files with distant repeated blocks, like virtual machine disk images. It also can be efficient for sets of large similar files in a solid archive, such as a collection of software ISO images differing by version or localization.
- WinRAR issues a prompt allowing to cancel or continue if dictionary size in extracted RAR archive exceeds "Maximum dictionary size allowed to extract" parameter in "Settings/Compression". It is done to prevent the unexpected excessive memory allocation.
- In the command line mode by default WinRAR refuses to unpack archives with dictionary exceeding 4 GB. Use -md or -mdx to allow unpacking dictionaries up to and including the specified size. Unlike -md, -mdx is applied to extraction only and can be added to RAR environment variable, not affecting archiving commands.
- "Define dictionary sizes" dialog in "Settings/Compression" can be used to customize dictionary sizes proposed in the drop down list associated with "Dictionary size" field in "Archive name and parameters" dialog.
- Alternate search algorithm, optimized to locate longer and more distant repeated data blocks, can be used when creating RAR archives. It helps to improve the compression ratio and sometimes speed for redundant data like big text files.
- It increases memory usage and might reduce the compression speed for some types of data. It can be turned on or off with "Long range search" options in "Advanced compression parameters" dialog or with -mcl[+|-] switch. If "Auto" option is selected, WinRAR applies the long range search depending on the compression method, dictionary size and other parameters. This algorithm is required for dictionaries exceeding 4 GB and turning it off is ignored for such dictionaries. [full version history]
Download: WinRAR 64-bit | 3.7 MB (Shareware)
Download: WinRAR 32-bit | 4.0 MB
Links: WinRAR Website | WinRAR Themes