How to choose optimal archiving settings?

You know that Winrar is able to upack many formts such as rar, zip, cab and so on. It makes you miserable to choose which format should be the optimal for you. Do not worry. This guide will tell you how to choose optimal archiving settings.

WinRAR is a powerful tool allows you to create, manage and control archive files. It is completely supports rar and zip. What's more, it is also able to unpack CAB, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZ, ACE, UUE, BZ2, JAR, ISO, 7Z, Z archives. It consistently makes smaller archives than the competition, saving disk space and transmission costs.

Guide on how to choose optimal archiving settings

When creating a new archive, you first need to select the archive format. ZIP is preferable only if you are not sure that a receiver of your archive has WinRAR. Otherwise it is recommended to select RAR, which supports more functions and higher compression. Read RAR versus ZIP topic for more information about archive formats.

In most cases RAR format provides significantly better compression than ZIP, especially in the solid mode. Another important RAR feature is support of multi-volume archives. They are more convenient and easier to use than so called ZIP "span disks" archives. WinRAR does not support ZIP disks spanning. If you need to create a multi-volume set, use RAR volumes instead.

RAR format has also a few important features missing in ZIP, such as the recovery record allowing to reconstruct damaged data and locking of important archives to prevent their accidental modification.

RAR format is able to handle files of practically unlimited size (up to 8,589,934,591 GB), when the maximum size of a single file in a ZIP archive is 2 GB. Note that older file systems do not support files larger than 4 GB and you will need to use NTFS to work with such files.

Rar fomat can raise compression ratio by 10% - 50% over more common methods, particularly when packing a large number of small, similar files.