I chose a non-solid setting because WinRAR’s help file explained that solid archives had a significant risk for my purposes. (7-Zip Help, available via F1, provided more information on word size and other aspects of the 7-Zip interface.)
Newer versions of WinRAR would confusingly offer RAR (rather than RAR5) as the latest version, with RAR4 as the legacy alternative.)įor 7-Zip, I started with 7z format, Ultra compression, LZMA2 (the default) (chosen because of 7-Zip’s limitation on options if I chose LZMA), 1024MB dictionary, word size = 256 bytes, non-solid, 6/8 CPU threads (so that it would not completely dominate the system), delete after compression.
(Later, I would find that a 32MB setting seemed to be considered optimal for the dictionary. For WinRAR, I chose RAR5, Best compression method, 1024MB dictionary, no options other than delete after compression. I began by choosing what I thought would be optimal for each. (Of course, that would not work if the user had configured WinRAR not to be available via the context menu.)īoth 7-Zip and WinRAR offered multiple configuration options. In a recent version of WinRAR, I found relevant settings by going into Windows Explorer > select a file > right-click > WinRAR > Add to Archive. This discussion includes references to WinRAR’s settings. (Note also a later post discussing security in 7-Zip, another post offering some WinRAR benchmarks, and a different post reviewing Windows native compression.) In that search, I decided to compare WinRAR 圆4 5.40 against 7-Zip 圆4 16.02. You may need a password to complete this action.I was searching for optimal compression. To complete the installation, copy unrar, rarfiles.lst, rar and default.sfx to the Bin folder. You will need to use the embedded Archive Utility to extract files from the TAR archive (the WinRAR installation file will download as a TAR archive utility). Download the file to your Mac OS X device. To find WinRAR download for Mac, visit the official WinRAR website, and select the version for Mac OS. Select WinRAR in the list that shows up, and the tool will unpack your compressed file.