.rar files

[deadman1972]

a lot of the torrent sites i use to download programs have a lot of .rar files.what is an rar file and how do i open and use one?i am running xp sp3 and ie7

[poisondeathray]

winrar

[Baldrick]

[deadman1972]

ok ok i get the point and have now used google and installed winrar but why are so many torrent files in .rar format is it better than others?

[poisondeathray]

.rar is just an archiving format. It has advantages & disadvantages just like any other format. The decision to use this format is probably not based on some objective analysis, rather some "scene rulez"

[Supreme2k]

It's so that you can be positive you are getting authentic warez.

[gll99]

Lay off guys.

This would have been a great question 15 years ago.

[deadman1972]

hey guys i never said i was up to date but i came here to learn from the experts

[jman98]

RAR was invented 15 years ago by a Russian software engineer. It offers data compression, file spanning and error recovery. The latter was particularly important at the time for Usenet as the previous method of Usenet encoding, UUencode, offered no error correction and transmission errors were quite common. RAR just elegantly solved a lot of problems that were a really big deal at the time and to a certain extent still are.

Be warned that RAR files can easily get corrupted in torrents and you may find that an archive can't be fully recovered because of this. On Usenet, PAR2 correction files are often posted along with RAR archives so there is a way to recover from errors, but PAR2 files are rarely available for torrents.
When you download a large number of RAR files in a torrent, either it works or you are out of luck and it doesn't.

[poisondeathray]

jman98 - How does PAR2 compare with winrar's recovery record? (e.g. in winrar you can specify a 10% recovery record and reconstruct corrupted files) - of course it's RARely used...

[jman98]

I can't compare the two because I've never seen a RAR file that actually could be recovered in WinRAR or with any other tools I've tried. I think a special recovery file has to be created while archiving and nobody seems to do it.

PAR2 enables the user to set up recovery for as much/little as they wish. 10% is the usual amount chosen, but you can do 5% or 20% or 50% or any number you wish. PAR2 works extremely well and in my experience 10% is more than enough to cover most transmission errors.