Kratty

Wow, a .rar file, I haven't seen too many of these....This might explain some insite to some folks..


Rar files are compressed archives. The term "Archive" in this context means that the file may contain one or more files, or even folders, much like folders on your hard disk. "Compressed" means that mathematical techniques have been used to reduce the space needed to store the files, so that the size of the archive may be much smaller than the size of the files it contains.

In short, Rar files are a space-saving way of storing single files or groups of related files.

There are many different compression techniques in use today. "Rar" is a development of the Zip compression method. It uses more advanced compression algorithms that can create even smaller archives - typically 8 to 30 per cent smaller than Zip archives.

Other enhancements incorporated in the Rar format include redundancy, which can enable damaged archives to be repaired, and support for international character sets, which allows files with non-English filenames to be stored. For this last reason, Rar archives are popular in Russia and other countries.

Files in a Rar archive will decompress to exactly their original state. This is called "lossless compression." The compression methods used with JPG image files or MP3 music files are called "lossy compression" because some of the quality of the original image or sound is lost during the compression process.

Rar files are used because they take up less space to store, and take less time to send or download. They are also a very convenient way to package and send groups of related files. However, you can't run a program directly from a Rar file. The files must be extracted or unzipped from the archive before they can be used.

There is no built-in support for Rar archives in any version of Windows. In order to open a Rar file you will need to use third party software.

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