Winrar, a popular archiving utility, now supports various archive formats including RAR and ZIP, along with the ability to unpack files in CAB, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZ, UUE, BZ2, JAR, ISO, 7Z, and Z. One of its key features is creating smaller archives compared to its counterparts, saving disk space and reducing data transfer costs.
The program ensures secure encryption of archives through the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) standard with a 128-bit key. It has the capability to handle files and archives up to 8.589 billion gigabytes, and allows users to create self-extracting and multi-volume archives. Additionally, by utilizing recovery and recovery volumes, even physically damaged archives can be repaired.
The latest version of Winrar, 7.00, introduces several notable enhancements:
- Support for compression dictionary sizes exceeding 1 GB for RAR archives, with the option to select a dictionary up to 64 GB based on available physical memory.
- Ability to specify non-power of two dictionary sizes, allowing for values like 5 GB or 22 GB for dictionaries over 4 GB.
- Archives with dictionaries over 4 GB can only be extracted using Winrar version 7.0 or later, requiring a 64-bit version for dictionaries surpassing 1 GB.
- Increasing dictionary size can improve compression for large files with widely spaced repeating blocks, such as virtual machine disc images or collections of similar files in solid archives.
- Winrar now provides a dialog box when unpacking archives with large dictionaries, exceeding the “Max dictionary size to extract” setting, to prevent unexpected memory allocation.
- Command line operations in Winrar default to not unpacking archives with dictionaries over 4 GB, but parameters like -MD or -MDX can enable unpacking up to specified sizes.
- Users can customize dictionary sizes in the compression settings dialog, enhancing flexibility in archive creation.
- An alternative search algorithm optimized for longer, distant data block repeats can boost compression ratio and speed, particularly for large text files.
Download Winrar 64-bit (3.7 MB) here and Winrar 32-bit (4.0 MB) here .