Besides basic compression functionality RAR format also supports various useful features. Below we tried to describe most commonly used ones.
This feature was very popular in the age of floppy disks where it was used to split an archive into multiple volumes. You may be familiar with such extensions as R00, R01, R02, ... Rxx (where XX any number from 00 to 99). These extensions are used to name sequential volumes of splitted RAR archive.
This feature is not forgotten even now and is used when it is needed to share one large file with lots of users. It is more flexible to split it into multiple volumes and deliver them one by one. This gives better protection from transmission errors.
One nice feature is that you can append your RAR archive to the end of the other file and RAR software will be able to consume it as a usuall RAR archive.
This way you can send a JPG file and RAR archive in one file. This will allow a receiver to open this file as usual JPG but at the same time have some archived information attached to it.
Solid compression is a slightly different way to compress files. Instead of compressing one file at a time this method just merges all files together and compresses them as one large file. This method significantly improves compression ration when you need to archive tons of small files.
This feature allows to protect information in archive using AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) which is a very strong way to protect your information. If you have a strong enough password and do not give it to anyone it is technically impossible to break this encryption.
This feature is very helpful for information protection. Besides just hiding information inside the files it also hides file names. Thus noone will be able to infer what information you store there from the filenames.
Extension Details | |
---|---|
Compression file format | |
MIME Type | |
application/x-rar-compressed application/octet-stream | |
Identifying Characters | |
Hex: 52 61 72 21 | |
Opens with: | |
WinRAR 7-Zip IZArc |