After 20 Years, I've Finally Found a Replacement for WinRAR

How to geek ^ | 30th July 2025 | Nick Lewis

[Cronos]

Quite frankly I prefer winzip for its interface and recovery to nanaZip. What about you?

[dinodino]

Haven’t used Windows since 2004…

[mjustice]

I read the article. This writer is a walking contradiction. Complaining that WinRAR isn’t open source while using Windows (which clearly isn’t open-source) is ridiculous.

[Duke C.]

I’ve been using 7-Zip for 20+ years. Free. No complaints.

[DataJunkie]

Been using PEAzip for years, it works just as good for what I need.

[trebb]

Been using an old version of 7-Zip for years - never had cause to look elsewhere - or for upgrades.

[Angelino97]

I've been using Windows for 30 years.

But what is WinRAR?

[Codeflier]

Used 7-Zip for years. I find I don’t zip files nearly as much anymore.

[Red Badger]

WinRAR PingRAR!................

[Red Badger]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinRAR

[Red Badger]

I used to use LHArc back in the day...............(now it’s the heart of the pdf)

[pas]

I thought this was going to be about some new baseball metric.

[ShadowAce]

[martin_fierro]

[catnipman]

“I’ve been using 7-Zip for 20+ years. Free. No complaints.”

ditto ...

[for-q-clinton]

Built in zip to windows is good enough for me. And it does 7-zip and tar now as well.

[ducttape45]

I like WinRAR the way it is. I’m older, more stuck in my ways, and the older user interface is just fine. Keep it simple.

[MikelTackNailer]

Back “in the day” storage space in the form of hard drives and portable formats cost serious money, so compression programs were a godsend. But I learned they would occasionally corrupt files somewhere in the compress/expand process in a way where those files were beyond recovery. In a job where one is handling other people’s money such errors are intolerable, so I avoided use of .zip wherever possible and just invested in ever-larger storage mediums.

Thirty years later those mediums have vastly improved and become much more affordable. Terabyte-plus solid state drives and multi-gigabyte thumb drives are now the norm while transmission technology has progressed everywhere short of Antarctica. But it’s good to know improvements have been made in old yet still-handy programs many people still rely on.

[Duke C.]

Bill James ping...

[Bikkuri]

7Zip worked fine on Linux for a long time..
Just recently, RAR files wouldn't unarchive, so I had to add 'unrar' to my Linux, and use the console/terminal.
When using the GUI, it would open then close without doing anything (and show nothing inside the archive).