Comparison - Zip and Rar Archives

Zip and Rar are technologies and algorithms for compressing computer files into smaller sizes, the Zip algorithm is older while the Rar algorithm for file compression is newer.
Because of its age and wide usage, ZIP support is built into most operating systems, but the support is rudimentary at best. I particularly dislike the limited" compressed folder wizard" I get by default in XP, Vista and Windows 7.

In contrast, WinRAR is full-featured, powerful, and integrates seamlessly with the shell. There's a reason WinRAR won the best archive tool roundup at DonationCoder . And WinRAR is very much a living, breathing piece of software. It's frequently updated with neat little feature bumps and useful additions; two I noticed over the last year were dual-core support and real-time stats while compressing, such as estimated compression ratio and predicted completion time.
WinRAR fully supports creating and extracting ZIP archives, so choosing WinRAR doesn't mean you'll be forced into using the RAR compression format. But you should use it, because RAR, as a compression format, clobbers ZIP. It produces much smaller
archives in roughly the same time . If you're worried the person on the receiving end of the archive won't have a RAR client, you can
create a self-extracting executable archive (or SFX) at a minimal cost of about 60 KB additional filesize.
RAR also supports solid archives, so it can exploit intra-file redundancies. ZIP does not. This is a big deal, because it can result in a substantially smaller archive when you're compressing a lot of files. When I compressed all the some programming code snippets , the difference was enormous:
ZIP = 229 KB
RAR = 73 KB
Rar also supports better security making it difficult for hackers to hack into its password protected files, so always go for RAR for achieving to help it gain traction and popularity in usage so that it can eventually overshadow the only advantage of zip files being compatibility as a result of wide audience usage.

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