Questions and answers
A: Please read Shell and command line mode topic. It contains
pointers to descriptions of several different ways to extract files.
Q: How could a user of my site (E-mail
system, FTP server etc.) extract files from RAR archives while RAR is shareware
and one must register after a 40 day evaluation period?
A: The RAR distribution archive contains a free
UnRAR utility, UnRAR.EXE, which can be used, without paying a license fee, by
anyone wanting to extract archives created by RAR. Asan additional BONUS to
this, the source code of a portable UnRAR is available on www.rarlab.com. Note that the RAR algorithm is
proprietary and you must not use UnRAR sources to reverse engineer it.
A: Visit WinRAR home page www.rarlab.com.
A: The extracted file is corrupt either because
of archive damage or problems with hardware. If an archive is damaged, but has a
recovery record, you may try to repair it, otherwise it is impossible to
restore damaged data. Note that in the case of solid
archive all files after a damaged file will be lost.
Q: I failed to extract files from a solid
multivolume RAR archive, because one archive volume was damaged. Help
me!
A: If you have recovery volumes for your archive, place them
to the same folder as your RAR volumes and double click on the first recovery
volume (REV file) to start recovery.
If recovery volumes are not available of if they did not help, try to apply Repair command to the damaged volume. Then rename the recovered volume, fixed.arcname.rar (or rebuilt.arcname.rar if recovery record was not found) to the actual volume name and try to unpack your archive again, starting from the first volume.
If you wish to improve chances of your multivolume RAR archives to be successfully repaired in case of data damage, use the recovery record and recovery volumes when creating them and better avoid solid archiving mode, even though non-solid archiving can result in a lower compression ratio.
If recovery volumes are not available of if they did not help, try to apply Repair command to the damaged volume. Then rename the recovered volume, fixed.arcname.rar (or rebuilt.arcname.rar if recovery record was not found) to the actual volume name and try to unpack your archive again, starting from the first volume.
If you wish to improve chances of your multivolume RAR archives to be successfully repaired in case of data damage, use the recovery record and recovery volumes when creating them and better avoid solid archiving mode, even though non-solid archiving can result in a lower compression ratio.
A: WinRAR encryption does not have any
backdoors. Even if we forget a password to any of our archives, we will not be
able to restore it. So please do not ask us to help in this situation.
A: It happens when you use drag and drop to
extract files or open archived files with an external viewer. In such case files
may still be in use when closing WinRAR and moreover, there is no reliable way
to detect if the external program still needs these unpacked files. So WinRAR
does not delete them immediately, instead, when you run WinRAR the next time,
all temporary files older than one hour will be deleted.
If you do not want to involve the temporary folder when extracting files at all, use either "Extract To" command in WinRAR shell or "Extract To" item in the archive context menu instead of drag and drop.
If you do not want to involve the temporary folder when extracting files at all, use either "Extract To" command in WinRAR shell or "Extract To" item in the archive context menu instead of drag and drop.
A: Even if you specified 4096 K dictionary size
in the compression settings, WinRAR may automatically decrease this value when
creating a new archive if the total archived data size is at least twice less
than dictionary size. It does not hurt compression and allows to reduce memory
requirements.
