WinRAR Professional
Version 7.23 · RARLAB · Windows 7 / 8 / 10 / 11 (32-bit and 64-bit) · ranked #17 in the library
The archiver everything else assumes you have installed, handling RAR and ZIP natively, extracting practically every other format, and adding recovery records so a damaged archive is still readable.
Read the installation section below before you start. The order of the steps matters on this release.
About this release
Overview
WinRAR creates RAR and ZIP archives and extracts nearly everything else: 7Z, TAR, GZ, BZ2, XZ, ISO, CAB, ARJ, LZH, UUE and more. That extraction coverage is why it ends up on almost every Windows machine at some point, and the shell integration means the whole thing works from the right click menu without ever opening the main window.
The RAR format itself is the reason to keep it rather than switch. Solid archives compress a folder of similar files far better than per-file compression. Recovery records let a corrupted archive repair itself rather than being a total loss, which matters for anything stored long term or transferred over a flaky link. Multi-volume splitting breaks a huge archive into parts sized for whatever medium you are moving it on.
Practical touches make up the rest: strong encryption with optional filename encryption, self-extracting archives for recipients without an archiver, repair and test commands, a benchmark to size compression settings against your processor, comment fields, and a command line interface for scripting backups. The interface is unfashionable and completely functional.
What it does
Feature breakdown
Broad format support
Creates RAR and ZIP, extracts 7Z, TAR, GZ, BZ2, XZ, ISO, CAB, ARJ, LZH, Z, UUE and several legacy formats.
Recovery records and repair
Add redundancy to an archive so corrupted sectors can be reconstructed, with a repair command that rebuilds what it can.
Solid and multi-volume archives
Much higher compression across many similar files, and splitting into parts of any size for transfer or storage.
Strong encryption
AES encryption of contents with an optional filename encryption pass so the archive listing is hidden as well.
Shell integration
Compress, extract here and extract to folder straight from the right click menu, with drag and drop into and out of archives.
Command line tooling
A full command line archiver for scripted backups, with switches for exclusions, recovery, splitting and logging.
Changed in this build
Version 7.23
- Improved compression ratio on already compressed media files in solid archives.
- Faster extraction of large ZIP archives with many small entries.
- Security fix in the handling of malformed archive headers.
- Updated several interface translations and the context menu icon set.
- Repair command now recovers more from archives with damaged central directories.
Installation
Follow these in order
- Extract the archive using whatever archiver you currently have.
- Run the installer and choose the file associations you want.
- Copy the included licence file into the installation folder.
- Start WinRAR and confirm the reminder window no longer appears.
- Optionally set the shell integration options from the settings dialog.
- Nothing else. It does not need to be offline and it does not run in the background.
Release notes
From whoever packed it
- The licence file must sit in the same folder as the executable, not in your user folder.
- Both architectures are in the archive. Use the 64-bit build unless the machine is genuinely 32-bit.
- The dictionary size setting matters more than the compression level for large solid archives.
System requirements
Minimum and recommended
| Operating system | Windows 7 through Windows 11, 32-bit or 64-bit |
|---|---|
| Processor | Any x86 or x64 processor |
| Memory | 256 MB, more helps with large dictionary compression |
| Graphics | No requirement |
| Storage | 10 MB for the program |
Questions about this release
Answered before you ask
- Does it still nag after forty days?
- No. With the licence file in place the reminder never appears.
- Can it create 7Z archives?
- It extracts them but does not create them. Use RAR or ZIP for creation.
- What does a recovery record cost me?
- Around three to ten percent of archive size depending on the setting, which is cheap insurance for anything archived long term.
Download
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