this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2025
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WinRAR is legitimately a great program and whomever made it deserves some compensation
Maybe it was good 10-20 years ago. What's it got to offer today? Why should we use a proprietary format when there are faster and more space-efficient open formats widely available today?
7-Zip has long replaced WinRAR, for me.
I just cannot stand the 7zip UX
Create archive:
7z a archive.7z file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf ...Extract archive:
7z x archive.7zWhat is there to hate? It's pretty much the same as every other archive tool that I've seen.
You mean you canβt figure it? Itβs solely the best compression tool around that you can think of.
I compare features, speed and compression ratio's of a bunch of options about twice a year. Up until now, winrar kept coming out on top, at least for my dataset
Interesting. Mind sharing which compression algorithms you compare and how?
winrar, (almost) all options available in peazip, I explore the options available in the then latest tar and zip commands under debian, and I look around to try some novelty stuff or if there's anything experimental.
I go one by one, setting up scripts to compress a directory with a particular algorithm and compression configuration. (and to record timstamps, check integrity, etc). Then collect a reasonably representative set of files from my ssd's.
Writing those scripts takes a few hours, but after that I hit run, and usually just screen record to a seperate ssd. After (usually) about a little over a day I can look back and see how long things took, and also have a video of all of them. I scrub it just to make sure nothing glitched out.
I have to say though, winrar's lead had shrunk a lot in my last test. Despite the new rar5 thing. Perhaps the next time will be different.
When is the next time? When I feel like it. After all, this is just a weird hobby I really enjoy.
What are the results?
I'd have to dig down my pc files for details. But winrar and 7z we're at the top of the stack, and lzma was a surprising 3rd place. Apparently some updates were made to the algorithm
I agree that winrar is better (or at least historically better since I don't routinely test like you do).
However the need to compress files is different than it has been. Storage space is always getting bigger and cheaper so I don't need to store anything compressed.
Compression is best for sharing files, which that has evolved greatly since the creation of rar files. And recently windows has added native 7z support so it's become the convenient choice.