Compressing with RAR vs ZIP [closed]

A lot of people are compressing files with RAR, sending compressed files with RAR and so on.

ZIP is more standard and works on all platforms. Windows users have ZIP included and Linux users have no trouble with that file format.

The tests I did sometime ago showed me that RAR compress better (some kilobytes, no more) but not enough to use a non-free program when ZIP works on almost all computers for free.

Why do some people use RAR rather than ZIP for compressing?

Solution 1:

Stop using these WinRAR and WinZip tools -- shift to 7-Zip.

It's free
available across platforms, as command-line and GUI
available in portable form across platforms
has good compression ratio (check the site or try for yourself)
has no pop-up pain
allows you to use most of the other formats
it is also open-source
can be used in commercial and personal development (within GNU LGPL constraints)
live support forum at Sourceforge
Vista 32-bit compatibility
multiple languages supported

The only compression format I find not supported for extraction is ACE.

References.

Ubuntu Forums: so what's the deal with rar, comparison posted Mar 25, 2007
Vista 64-bit performance test reference, Nov 1, 2007
PowerArchiver discussion: gets difficult to charge you for 7-Zip, Jul 24, 2008
7-Zip: The Digital Equivalent of a Sledgehammer and Crowbar, Jan 13, 2009
Ubuntu Karmic proposal with justifications: include p7zip-full in ubuntu-restricted-extras metapackage, May 21, 2009
Gizmos freeware comparison: Best Free File Archiver/Zip Utility, Jun 27, 2009
Look at how they compare here at Superuser:
“Must Have” Windows Software & “Must-Have” Open Source software

_{I am told that my opening sentence to this answer feels 'markety'.}

I take it with all the good intention, because
without being paid for this free software or
being in any way associated with it or, the people making it,
I strongly feel the desire to push it to everyone I remotely know.

This comes from my innumerable encounters over the years with
people using these other tools and muttering about incompatibilities,
annoying pop-ups and many other problems, yet, somehow
continuing to miss 7-Zip when it arrived on the scene.

I have since decided to take every opportunity to publicize 7-Zip.

Solution 2:

It's HARDCORE!

Really.
That's most RAR users' reason for preferring RAR: Part of the scene. A standard. A sign of doing things like the black-arts-pros do it.

None of these are valid reasons. There was an argument that RAR was faster or that RAR achieved smaller sizes, and this holds true versus ZIP files. But the same people will insist on splitting RAR archives, and creating non-MD5 sums and generating an extra PAR parity file when in the end, they're going to use a Torrent and not Usenet to move the files. In torrents there's no reason for any of that. In fact there's a strong reason not to compress, so the file can be used while being seeded.

But as you can see from here already, the value of having a good version or implementation of the compressor and decompressor can not be understated, and WinRAR just fails that test.

7-Zip takes that cake, and generally does better for size and speed. BZip2 really should be in the running, but lots of people don't have a good GUI implementation. The command-line is great of course, but right clicking like 7-Zip, or drag-and-drop like StuffIt is just so much easier.

Here's someone's 2002 measurements that seem to put RAR ahead. But multi-threading and memory use are allowing for changes in this area that seem to leave RAR behind.

P.S. The worst example of compression used badly is when I see image, video and audio files that are already compressed with a lossy compression like JPEG, DivX, or MP3 further "compressed" with any lossless format. I'm sorry but it should be obvious that in most cases you're not reducing the file to less than 95% of the original size, and in that case you're just wasting everyone's time and efforts.

Solution 3:

One feature about WinRAR is it preserves the original creation dates of folders on extraction.

Both rar and .zip preserve folder creation date/time but it seems only winrar preserves that info on extraction

Solution 4:

A point against RAR is that there is (as far as I know) no free software that can compress it. As current versions of WinRAR can decompress 7z (and 7z can decompress rar), and 7z usually compresses better than zip (and often better than rar), I tend to send those who send me RAR files 7Z files back :)

All the others get plain old .zip files of course. Maybe they learn from it ;)

Solution 5:

RAR files don't have the limits that ZIP files do. I think ZIP files are limited to containing 65536 files and each file and the total size of the archive is limited to approximately 4GB. There is ZIP64, but it is not an open file format.

From Wikipedia's entry on the Zip file format:

The maximum size for both the archive file and the individual files inside it is 4,294,967,295 bytes (2³²−1 bytes, or 4 GiB minus 1 byte) for standard .ZIP, and 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 bytes (2⁶⁴−1 bytes, or 16 EiB minus 1 byte) for ZIP64.

Wikipedia also states that RAR was first released in 1993, whereas ZIP64 may not have been released until 2001(?). Also support for ZIP64 was not built in to Windows XP.