Evgeny Roshal has released a significant new version of the RAR archiver 7.0. The source code of RAR remains available but is distributed under a restrictive license agreement. Ready builds are available for Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, and FreeBSD.
From personal experience, RAR7 still lags behind LZMA2 in terms of compression with dictionaries up to 4GB, but it offers significantly higher compression speed and supports some features not available in 7-Zip, such as recovery information and support for fields not only for file modifications but also for creation and last access. The recently released archiver 7-zip 24.01 fully supports the updated RAR format.
What's new:
- Support for dictionaries up to 64 gigabytes has been added, allowing for more efficient compression of very large amounts of data, such as images. of virtual machines. For dictionaries larger than 4 gigabytes, any size can be specified, not just powers of two as in previous versions. To unpack archives with a dictionary larger than 4GB, RAR/WinRar 7 and above is required.
- A new algorithm for finding repeating similar data has been added, which improves compression levels and/or speeds up the compression process. It is controlled by the command line option "-mcl[+|-]" (enable/disable) — it is off by default.
- A new slower algorithm for thorough repeating searches has been introduced, which can be activated with the option "-mcx". For compression dictionaries up to 4GB, archives with both options will be supported for extraction by RAR versions starting from 5.
- The maximum length of file paths in the archive has been increased from 2047 to 65,535 characters.
Source: opennet.ru
