Information AboutRar |
The Acronym RAR redirects to this page; see RAR (disambiguation) for other meanings of RAR. In Computing , RAR is a Proprietary ''' File Format ''' for Data Compression and Archiving . The RAR file format was developed by Eugene Roshal (hence the name RAR: Roshal '''Ar'''chive), who was born on March 10 , 1972 in Russia and graduated from Chelyabinsk Technical University. He also developed programs for packing and unpacking RAR files, originally for DOS , and later ported to other platforms. The encoder (the main Windows version known as WinRAR ) is distributed as Shareware , but Roshal has released the decoder's Source Code under a license that allows free distribution and modification, on condition that it is not reverse-engineered to build a compatible encoder. The current developer is Alexander Roshal . The encoding method is held to be proprietary, but compatible programs for decompression are available for several Platforms , such as the open-source 7-Zip . The file extension is .rar. The MIME -Type is application/x-rar-compressed. COMPARISON TO OTHER COMPRESSION ALGORITHMS As computing power has increased according to Moore's Law , users have responded by preferring compression algorithms which achieve a better rate of compression at the expense of computational time when compressing and decompressing. RAR compression operations are typically much slower than compressing the same data with early compression algorithms like ZIP and Gzip , but a much better rate of compression is achieved whenever the data can still be compressed further. If the data is as tight as it can get, such as if it is already compressed, the RAR file may turn out to be larger due to Computational Overhead . Bzip2 , which came after ZIP and gzip, compresses more efficiently at a cost of computational time compared to them, but is in turn less efficient and computationally cheaper than RAR. 7z 's LZMA algorithm is quite similar to RAR in providing extremely high compression efficiency at the cost of compute time to compress and decompress. Both provide among the highest compression efficiency of any popular scheme, with which algorithm is more efficient compression scheme strongly depending on the files being compressed. RAR is a Proprietary algorithm, which could be counted against it if the comparison isn't made directly on the grounds of effectiveness. Both WinRAR and 7-Zip are still being actively developed. ARCHIVER FEATURES Apart from the excellent rate of compression, RAR has several other features not previously found in many other archive formats, which has contributed greatly to its popularity:
SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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