WinRAR

About WinRAR

This is the plain desktop build of the archiver, and its value is entirely in coverage. Whatever container arrives, it opens: RAR, ZIP, 7Z, TAR, GZ, BZ2, XZ, ISO, CAB, ARJ, LZH, UUE and a long tail of formats nobody has created deliberately in twenty years but which still turn up attached to emails.

Day to day it is used from the shell rather than from a window. The context menu offers extract here, extract to a named folder, add to archive and add to a named archive, which covers essentially every operation most people ever need. Double clicking an archive opens a browser view where files can be dragged out individually or previewed before extraction.

On the writing side it produces RAR and ZIP. RAR is where the useful behaviour lives: solid compression that treats a set of similar files as one stream for a much smaller result, recovery records that let a damaged archive be repaired, split volumes sized for a specific medium or upload limit, and self extracting archives for handing files to someone with nothing installed.

The remaining tools are small but well worn. Test verifies an archive before extraction rather than after a failure, repair rebuilds a damaged file where a recovery record exists, the benchmark reports honestly whether the processor is the limiting factor, and compression profiles save a set of options so the same job does not need reconfiguring every time.

What is included in this build

• Reads RAR, ZIP, 7Z, TAR, GZ, BZ2, XZ, ISO, CAB, ARJ, LZH and legacy formats
• Writes RAR and ZIP with fine grained compression level control
• Solid compression producing much smaller archives across similar file sets
• Recovery records allowing a damaged archive to be repaired
• Split volumes sized to a medium or an upload limit
• Self extracting archives for recipients with nothing installed
• Shell integration covering compress, extract and preview from a right click
• Test, repair, benchmark and saved compression profiles

Changed in version 7.23

• Faster extraction from large solid archives
• Improved handling of unusual character encodings in stored file names
• Additional detection for older container formats
• Context menu behaviour corrected on current Windows 11 builds
• Lower memory use when testing very large archives

Installation walkthrough

These steps assume a clean machine. If a previous release of the same application is present, deal with that first, since an overlapping install is the most common cause of a setup that stops halfway.

1. Close any open archive windows before starting.
2. Run the installer as administrator.
3. Pick which container formats to associate on the setup screen.
4. Enable the context menu entries if shell integration is wanted.
5. Set a default compression profile from the options panel afterwards.

System requirements and file details

Frequently asked about this title