Just saying that 7-Zip is great, both the compression (I use it for most of my data archival, because the higher compression ratio is worth the longer times to compress) and the software itself, pretty much what a good archival program on Windows should be like.

On other OSes, I guess I just use whatever is included with the distro, or something like PeaZip: https://peazip.github.io/

Curious to hear from RAR proponents.

I've ran into issues unzipping to a path too long with 7-Zip but immediately resolved with WinRAR. Might be a trivially solvable problem, but since WinRAR worked, I didn't bother investigating.

I used to use it a lot in the past and I think it was mostly the convenience factor for me personally. I didn't want to learn another piece of software and I thought that WinRar did what it was supposed to do, reasonably well.

The developer of 7-zip has a questionable approach to security for an application that's meant to handle untrusted files, he prioritizes small binary size above hardening against exploits most of the time. DEP was disabled until 64-bit Windows forced the issue by making it mandatory, ASLR was disabled until fairly recently because he considered relocation tables to be unnecessary bloat, and the more advanced mitigations like CET and CFG still aren't used to this day. I don't know how robust the actual code is, but an attitude of executable size being the most important metric doesn't fill me with confidence that it tries to handle all possible edge cases.

With Windows 11 now having support for 7z/rar/etc built-in I'd be inclined to just default to using that if it covers your use-cases.

> Windows 11 now having support for 7z/rar/etc built-in I'd be inclined to just default to using that if it covers your use-cases.

I hope Microsoft is keeping bsdtar/libarchive up to date. IIRC they weren't.

Considering neither WinRAR or 7-zip update themselves automatically, and most people never bother to update them manually, I'm not sure that's any worse than the status quo. The libraries bundled into Windows at least could be kept up to date by Windows Update.

Question.

Does Microsoft have to pay a license for being able to support RAR or are they now effectively putting winrar out of business?

The unrar cli is published under a source-available license that you can't use it to build a rar compressor. So using knowledge from reading that might be fair game for building a rar decompressor, especially if you follow the usual clean-room protocols (one person reads the code and writes documentation, the other reads the documentation and writes new code).

Not sure how that will affect winrar in the long term. Of course people now aren't forced to download software to open rar files. But it also makes it much more viable to send .rar files to random people. And actual Winrar still offers you a lot of features that Windows doesn't have and seems to be a lot faster, so there are still plenty of reasons for power users to use it.

Personally I own a winrar license primarily for its features when creating archives, and Windows isn't encroaching on that.

I don't know but this is their response to the Microsoft's announcement.

https://twitter.com/WinRAR_RARLAB/status/1663493174642323457

Stealing an older comment of mine since this comes up occasionally

- better .tar.gz handling: Winrar treats it as one file, 7zip as a tar in a gz that have to be extracted separately

- recovery records to be able to recover from mild bit rot (basically built-in .par2 without the mess)

- support for more NTFS attributes and features (saving alternate streams, security records, storing hard links as links instead of separate files, etc)

- can do useful things with the archive attribute of files if you so desire (archiving only files with the attribute set, clearing the attribute after, optionally deleting them)

- better GUI (the style is a bit dated, but the 7zip UI is just an incomplete WinRAR clone with smaller icons)

Overall WinRAR is the much more solid archival tool. If all you need is something to decompress archives WinRAR isn't too different from 7zip, but has a slightly nicer UX.

I love the batch archive extract capabilities and features like deleting each archive after extraction as you go really helps out when you are running low on space etc

Also:

- Allows switching non-utf8 zip filename encodings from the menu, it's a mess with 7zip;

- Its context menu works inside Sandboxie without bugs;

- GUI is really much better, so I will reiterate the point. 7zip basically froze in time with it.

> the 7zip UI is just an incomplete WinRAR clone with smaller icons

The icons still look like a Windows 3.1 app, but you can make them bigger:

View > Toolbars > Large Buttons

My usual workflow with archive files (that I've just downloaded) is clicking the file in my browser's download list to open it and then extracting it. In WinRAR, the extraction path is pre-filled to be "<archive directory>/<archive name>", and there is an option to automatically open this folder after extraction. 7-Zip doesn't have this, so I'd need to manually add the archive name to the extraction path and then separately browse to it. Granted, if you browse to the archive and right click it, 7-Zip does have an option to extract to an "<archive name>" folder (though this still doesn't automatically open it afterwards), but that's an unnecessary extra step.

[delayed]

Support for splitted archives, recovery records, and encryption. And pretty good compression ratio too.

Maybe most archivers support these features today, but rar command line flags are in my muscle memory.