ARCHIVED: What is WinRAR?

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WinRAR is a competing product to WinZip; both products compress/decompress and archive files. Files compressed with WinRAR typically have the .rar extension, as opposed to .zip for WinZip archives. WinRAR can also create and decompress a WinZip archived file.

Like later versions of WinZip, WinRAR can create archives in multiple parts; that is, it not only can compress a file but can split it up into smaller parts. In WinZip, this is called a split Zip file; in WinRAR, it's called a multipart or multivolume archive. When this is done, the smaller RAR files are given the following extensions, in this order: .rar, .r00, .r01, and so forth. To decompress a multipart archive, make sure all the component files are in the same directory and double-click the .rar file. WinRAR will automatically find all the other files without you having to select them, and assemble the final decompressed file from them.