WinRAR is much easier to use than 7-zip in my experience. PeaZIP is easier than both, but WinRAR still wins on the "you don't actually need to know what a zip file is" point. It's both a blessing and a curse though - I've had a couple of situations where people were running portable programs from zip files and promptly losing their work once they closed WinRAR.

> WinRAR is much easier to use than 7-zip in my experience.

In what way?

The big icons make way more sense and more things have icons, the ".." line is more natural than the dedicated "dir up" button, the "create archive" dialog is more organized and its options more discoverable...

And when you run an executable from it, it (I think) unzips the whole archive, not just the file, so DLLs etc. can be loaded properly. Just saves some effort and thinking when you need it and doesn't make a difference when you don't

Never compared archivers at length, cannot speak as to the actual features. But 7z has this distinct unfinished open-source GUI tool look. That's all I remember about it. It may or may not be true that it has poor UX. But the aesthetics certainly do signal this. Personally, on Windows I used 360压缩 which seems to be a better looking winrar clone without nag screens. On Linux it's "atool -x" for extracting (there's no decent Linux file explorer, so the main selling point of archiver guis is moot too).

> there's no decent Linux file explorer

Dolphin, PCManFM, and MC would all like a word with you.

Also, 7Zip is no harder to use than the built-in Windows zip extractor if you use the context menu.

Thunar, will also want to have a say

> there's no decent Linux file explorer

There's Double Commander, which also works great on Windows and beats sibling-mentioned Dolphin and even PCManFM hands down.

There's also Ranger and nnn, if you need a CLI and don't want an orthodox file manager.

> there's no decent Linux file explorer

If this is true (and I wouldn't know because I haven't had a GUI file manager on my Linux desktop since the early 2000s), it's because GUI file managers are for casuals.

7zip is hard to learn because it's straight to the punch with no BS. Regular people don't like that stuff. They want nice visuals and receive cognitive dissonance for something they pay for.

Cognitive dissonance?? Do you see how full of yourself you are being? Other people like something different than what you like - deal with it!

WinRAR is better as an archiving tool than 7zip. It has more features, recovery records, a much better self-extracting generator (7zip's is laughably primitive), more ways to compress files (e.g. compressing multiple folders into separate archives) and it is also much faster than 7zip when compressing. Also AFAIK it is the only that supports NTFS streams, though i'm not sure how often that is needed (but might be, e.g. for preserving the downloaded status of files).

And very annoyingly, 7zip has had for years a race condition where when you open a file inside an archive, it extracts the file in the temporary folder and then... it deletes it before the associated application manages to load it. It is hit and miss when it works - often it does, but then for some reason i haven't figured out it just deletes the file. And related to that 7zip extracts only the file you double click on, so e.g. it doesn't extract any data files an executable might need or images or subpages an HTML file may refer to.

I have both installed and in my experience WinRAR is by far the better tool when it comes to handling archives with the main exception (and the only reason i have 7zip installed) being that 7zip supports extracting from far more archive formats - including disk images (i use it all the time to extract files from VirtualBox, PCem, etc disk images and seems to support a variety of file systems too).

Yes — what 7zip has going for it is that it’s free, good format support and probably usually slightly better compression ratio. But that’s basically it. WinRAR is a very competent archiver tool where you might prefer it for many reasons. One annoyance I have with 7zip is its surprising number of non-implemented features. Just today I tried dragging a file to replace an existing and got the message “access denied”. That was like code for “not supported” because deleting the file first worked. Sometimes you do get sudden “not implemented” though for the most basic operations even after all these years.

I’m not dissing Igor Pavlov. He’s a very skilled developer as for compression format development. But he ought to get some assistance on the archiver software front.

Back in the day, one of the selling points of the RAR format was that it could partition large files into multiple archives, so you could upload it in chunks, or copy it to multiple flash drives or CDs. Have other archive formats caught up with this feature?

I was about to reply a little snarkily that I was doing this with zip archives on floppy disks back in the 90s. I thought I might as well check my facts before posting, and it looks like that was a part of WinZip that was not part of the standard.

In 2015 ISO published a standard pertaining to zip archives, and one of the specifications was (from Wikipedia):

  Archives may not span multiple volumes or be segmented.

There are also multiple forum posts when you search for multipart zip archives of Linux users asking how to decompress them, suggesting that this is only WinZip behaviour and not common to the zip standard.

I remember people using arj exactly because of that feature. Compression with arj was worse than zip but people used it because you could divide an arj archive in floppies. At the time, rar could do it too, but it only got popular later.

I had the same reaction, but checked a different set of facts than you did. PKZIP 2.04g (which at the time was the standard) supported split archives, in January 1993. WinZip added support in version 8.1, in 2001.

Edit: I just found the page where you got your quote. Looks like ISO was deliberately defining a subset of ZIP.

Caught up? tar has had this for a few billion years at least:

  $ tar cazf - file1 file2 | split -b 700m - out.tgz

7zip also natively supports splitting for as long as I can remember.

You didn't address this:

> or copy it to multiple flash drives or CDs

How would you use 'split' without either dumping the whole archive on disk or pluggin all drives at the same time?

tar was designed for tape, so you can specify a volume size for the output and it will break it's output into segments of that size. Using split isn't required.

The options in gnu tar are -L and -M for specifying tape length (in KB) and creating multi-volume archives.

The -L version is handy as it can prompt you to change the "tape". It has built-in tape handling as well, if you are using a real tape that can be controlled via mt.

Apparently (just checked info) it supports an arbitrary command to execute at the end of each archive. That would be handy for burning CDs, though I don't remember that feature from when I used floppies or QIC-40 to move files from one machine to another.

Around 1991-ish I would use these options to put archives onto stacks of floppy disks. The floppies didn't have a filesystem, just blocks of tar archive. In the days of 9600 bps modems, this was often the fastest way to move stuff to another machine. I had an often-reused stack of 3.5in HD floppies labeled with numbers for this purpose.

ARJ had that feature and it predates RAR by a few years.

Isn't that just the same as splitting any file into multiple chunks? Why does the archive format have to know about it? For non-solid compression? Otherwise, any file can be split up and re-combined at the other end, unless you don't have the hard drive space to recombine it.

The only way I've seen RAR used in torrents is to package everything into one big file, and since they're usually video or audio that already has lossy compression, and since I may want to prioritize or skip certain files, it's both pointless and annoying.

I don't know, but I think such feature would be way less valuable today.

There are niche uses, mostly with some forms of file sharing with limited file size. For example email attachments, but not only this.

true but its still used heavily on eg usenet binaries, and nzb tools run the 100s of unrar for you not unlike the gui

7zip for sure has. It actually supports it for more than just 7z format.

Multiple floppies! Floppies... "flash drives"... pfft.

I mostly use 7zip but I've had a number of archives in the past that would simply not properly extract using 7zip and WinRAR had no issues with. 7zip is fine, however I don't see it as superior really in any notable way. I don't understand why everyone is crazy over it at this point. It's good, but so is WinRAR. Why is it sad for people to use one good program over the other when they both accomplish the same thing in about the same way? There's very little special about 7zip for typical day to day use.

7zip does not properly handle japanese character sets on Windows. Winrar does, though you have to specify the language.

In the UI? In file names? In the file contents?

I have vague memories that things like Shift JIS file names get scrambled? IIRC it was a case of it using the users default non-Unicode / “ANSI” codepage instead of offering a selection like Winzip apparently does.

In the extracted contents. Various assets for Unity would come with folders and file names in Japanese. 7zip would extract them without the proper names and so all relative patching would be completely messed.

Winrar does it fine.

I use winrar because it can add a recovery record to the file, so if the file gets corrupted some years down the line I can hopefully repair the archive. 7z cannot do this, unless you create extra par2 files next to it afterwards.

The only thing that comes to mind is the lack of par files or some equivalent construct.

Perhaps they paid for it and it's a sunken cost fallacy.

Most people I see using winrar have not paid for it. And they have to deal with the snag screen every time. I think it has to do with inertia.

Educate them if you can. Whenever I see someone using crapware like bandicam I give them a link to OBS Studio and briefly describe its advantages. Same for winrar and 7zip. They usually don't know any better and were using whatever everyone else was using.

Companies tend to use it and buy new licenses due to the same inertia you mentioned. Although the more cost conscious will at some point switch to the free alternatives.

Recovery records.

maybe they want to unpack rar-archives?

You can do that with 7zip IIRC

AFAIK there're opensource decompressors for rar files. Except for RAR6 which are definitely not very common.

In fact, unrar has been open sourced by WinRAR themselves. Or rather, they made the source available, with certain conditions, i.e. not using it to reverse engineer the rar format.