Winrar Tips and Tricks

WinRAR is a powerful archiver and archive manager that can open all popular compression formats as well as it's own RAR format, which can usually compress content 8 to 15 percent more than ZIP or ARJ files.

WinRAR's main features are strong general and multimedia compression, processing of non-RAR archives (ZIP,ARJ,CAB,TAR etc.) long filename support, programmable self-extracting archives (SFX), damaged archive repair, authenticity verification, embedded file comments, and encryption.

WinRAR is also able to browse and unpack contents of ISO files

Improve Compression in Winrar

As you know Winrar is more popular and powerful than other compressor softwares. To better compress your files and folders follow below steps:

1. Right click on your file and select "Add to archive…" from context menu. A dialog box will appear.
2. In General tab and in "Compression Method" dropdown menu, select "Best".
3. Click on Advanced tab and then click on "Compression" botton. Advanced Compression Parameters dialog box will appear.
4. In Text Compression section select Force and in Prediction Order type 63 and in Memory to use type 128. Then click Ok twice.

This method will compress files 10% more than normal method

Compress Large Files Using Winrar

Do you wish to compress files so that it can transfer easily between storage devices, or when you want to upload it to an email or how about when you just want to save precious hard drive space when storing files.Well, now you can just do that.

WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. You can download the trial version of the software at www.rarlab.com

To compress large file using Winrar follow simple steps given below:

Step 1: Select and Right click on the file you want to Compress and select Add to Archive option.

Step 2: A window will pop up with various options. In Archive name field type the name of your archive manually in the text box provided below.

Step 3: When creating a new archive, you first need to Select the archive format. ZIP is preferable when you are not sure that a receiver of your archive has WinRAR. Otherwise just select RAR, since it provides more options and higher compression.

Step 4: There are six compression methods supported: "Store", "Fastest", "Fast", " Normal", "Good" and "Best". The Best method provides high, but slow compression. Fastest method compresses poorly, but it is very fast. Store method just merges files into an archive without any compression. If you want to create an archive for distribution or for long storage, It would be best to probably ignore the time constraint and choose the Best compression method to reduce the size as much as possible. But for daily backups choose Normal compression method.

Step 5: At the bottom there is a Tab saying “Split to Volume, Bytes” In the box enter a figure or you can use the drop down menu to make your choice. Remember you have to enter the value in bytes, kilobytes or megabytes and this applies only to .rar extension. (1024 KB equals 1 MB)
In the example below, I have chosen 98078 KB which comes to around 95.77 MB.

Step 6: When you have chosen the right options for your archive, click the OK button.
(In my example below, the video file I had chosen was compressed into three parts comprising of 95.7 MB each)

Winrar effectively – 7 tips

WinRAR is one of the most popular compressing tools which is used to reduce the size of files which allows you to send large file over email or popular file sharing service. Winrar is similar to winzip but with additional functionality. So in this post I am putting down my hands on experience which will help you to know how to use winrar in a productive way.

Enable Explorer-like view

Single pane view is the default view, using that you will have to keep changing folders one by one to reach your file. But there is an easy way. One the winrar interface, goto “Options > Folder Tree > Show Disk Folder”. This will give you an explorer like window and selecting a file is easy now.

Enable Detail View

By default, you will get to see list but we need to see the details from time to time. “Goto “Options > File List > Details”

Check how much will be the compression and how long will it take to compress

This a very unique feature of  Winrar.  In case you have a huge folder structure to zip, how do you know how much it can be compressed and how much Winrar will take it to compress. Winrar has an inbuilt functionality which can help you find that.

• Select one or multiple file which you want to compress, then on the winrar look for an “Info” Tab.
• Click that and you will get another window with 4 tabs.
• The first tab contains an “Estimate Button” . Clicking in this , the tool will tell you how much your data can be compressed in percentage and how much time will it take to compress.
     
• This is extremely useful as it will save a lot of time of yours instead of sitting and waiting it to finish.

Split Files using Winrar

What would you do if the compression measurement tells you that size can not be compressed more than 90% and size is too big either to fit on cd or mail. Winrar acts more than a compression tool. Here is how you can use it to split.

• Choose a file or folder you want to split.
• Right clicking on it and click “Add files to archives”
• It opens a tab, now you need to find “Split to file, bytes” drop down menu which is present at the lower part.
• Either you can enter tha value in bytes or select a predefined format like, 1.44 Mb floppy, CD Rom, DVD or even auto detect. The auto detect feature can check the destination space and split files according to that.
• Now archive it. You will see a list of files generated which are according to your need.

Make a Self Extracting archive:

Its a general problem that if I send you a winrar compressed archive you might not have the same software to open it or the worst you don’t have any compression tool.

So what can you do? Easy, You can create a self extracting archive which will act like the softwares which get installed in one step.

• Click on Existing file you want to compress and make a normal archive.
• Now select the archive you just made, “Go to Tools > Convert archive to SFX”
• One more way is while creating an archive, you can just ask it to make an SFX.

Compress and Mail

Winrar also allows you to send any file on mail by automatically compressing and then attach to mail. There is a Compress and email  feature which has to be enabled if its not.

• Go to Options > Settings .
• It opens up another screen with lot of tabs. Click on the tab named Integration
• On the tab look for a button with label Context Menus. Click that
• This will open another window, which shows the list of features which pops up when you right click a file.
• Enable the Compress and email by checking it.
• Now right click on any file and you will see the menu enabled.

Change The Temporary Folder

Winrar requires to use a temporary place when it tries to compress a file. By default its located somewhere in C drive. If you don’t have much space there, you can always change the location.

• Goto Options > Settings .
• This opens up another scree with tabs, Now go to Paths Tab.
• Click on “Choose folder for temporary files” and select a path which suits you.

Create Windows Installer :

Winrar also helps you create installer program i.e. similar to setup files to install anything. This can be used to create simple program using your files and folder to install it on your friends computer and make it look professional. Check out “How to create professional installer using winrar”

Test an Archive before extracting it :

You can right click on any archive and select  Test Archived Files. This will make initial check like header corrupt etc and tell you if the un archiving operation will be successful or not. This is useful when you have a big archive file. In case you find a corrupt archive, you can right click and select Repair Archive to fix.