WinRAR Introduction Comparison -Archiver Feature -Compression Speed -Compression Ratio -Common Feature Strength

Introduction The most practical reason for archiving, beyond data compression, is file aggregation; that is, archiving: storing many files into one output file, or more simply, turning the many into one. The most frequent uses of archiving are to: (1) reduce size of email attachments, (2) decompress RAR, ZIP, 7z and other files downloaded from internet — the smaller the file size, the more compressed it is, the less time spent downloading it, and (3) create new archives in RAR, ZIP, and 7z file formats. Archive tools are also frequently used to split files, add error detection and correction information, and provide security through encryption. What makes a GOOD archiver? That depends on how you intend to use it, and few are able to keep just one archiver on their desktop for all their needs. What make an archiver excellent are the totality of its strengths and the reduction of weaknesses. The more formats a program can handle, the better. This review confirmed that the old ZIP format we all know is showing its age, producing files that are unacceptaby large. WinZip (10.x) introduces two new formats in its newest version, one of which, PPMd, can only be read using WinZip itself. This is a highly questionable move, given that the user community has settled on 7z and RAR formats for their future archives. One feature that soon became apparent was archive speed (or compression speed). While it is not essential, slow archiving speed became tortuous to endure, and since this review focused on archiving a 1G (1084M) game application under the guise of testing the abilities and limits of various formats, it is a feature that cannot be overlooked, and developers would be wise to focus much of their effort in future versions. Another significant feature centered on drag and drop performance. Drag and drop support is an ease-of-use issue. Most users want to sit down and start archiving without reading the manual, and clumsy implementations of either their shell integration or drag and drop quickly raise the learning curve. Some archivers like WinZip and WinRAR feature seamless drag-n-drop archiving onto their program windows, but too many were awkward or just did not bother.