RAR File

File Extension: .rar Developer: Eugene Roshal Views: 3359430 Updated: 2011-12-02 14:30:25 Hex: 52 61 72 21 1A 07 00 ASCII: Rar!...

An archive is a container used for storing data and in the case of RAR archives these are in a compressed format and have been created using the program WinRAR which uses RAR as its native format.

THe RAR format was developed by Eugene Roshal and was originally used for DOS but was eventually ported to other platforms and supports data compression, file spanning and error recovery.

There have been till now 3 versions of the RAR format which are:

  » RAR

  » RAR2

  » RAR3

RAR was the original version and at the moment the version 3 is the curent one and has been used since WinRAR 2.9 and has many changes when compared to the previous version, examples of this are.

  » AES 128bit Encryption

  » Better compression algorithm

  » Archive greater in size than 9GB

  » Unicode support

There is at this moment in time only one program available that is able to create RAR files which is WinRAR, though many other are able to read and extract RAR files such as.

  » Winzip

  » RarZilla

  » 7-Zip

Though compressing files using RAR is slower than other compression formats the compression rates achieved are usually better.