Some compression formats are actually designed for data archival and compression. Rar is one such format. One of the early use cases was data archival onto long term storage mediums such as tape. As such, it has built in parity which means you can recover partially corrupted archives. It can also do things like split the archive up over many smaller files. Again, because this sort of thing was needed for backing up to tape, floppy, etc in the late 90s/early 2ks.

> It can also do things like split the archive up over many smaller files.

Are there other archival formats on par with RAR without the licensing voodoo I see people mentioning?

You'd need to use a tool like par2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive) on top of a 7z file to get a recovery record.

Winrar save extra information to the compressed file. So in case your .rar file damage, it can be recovered.