It has an elegant simple interface with basic important features (Unicode, etc).īut most of all it is significantly faster than WinRAR/WinZip, makes slightly smaller ZIPs than WinZip. Wanted something simpler and ended up with BandiZip. I had WinRAR and WinZip side by side to fill each others gaps, being licensed for WinRAR since the 1990's. But for people who need these features, using WinRAR isn't an irrational choice. I agree most people probably won't ever encounter this scenerio and it's pointless to request FOSS programs to spend their development resources on such 'useless features'. This feature is irrelevant to most people nowadays, but can save you lots of time in case you encounter an archive file in a format which doesn't support unicode in filenames (such as zip) and contains file named in a codepage different from the 'language for non-Unicode program' of your system. For example, 'Name encoding' allows you to select a codepage of the archive you're opening. WinRAR also contains features that are less known but can be useful in rare situation. If I'm not mistaken PeaZip allows recovery records in some of its supported archive formats, although I am not sure if the GUI has an option for the other things I mentioned. PeaZip might be a better FOSS alternative. However, for people who need additional features that WinRAR offers, 7-Zip can't completely fulfill their needs. I also mostly use 7-Zip for extraction and I wish it stays simple and efficient as it is now. If 7-Zip offers everything you need, that's great. For example, the option 'Put each file to separate archive' can be useful when you want to compress many directories into different archives.Ĭertainly you can use another program for recovery records, and people familiar with scripting can handle the 'Put each file to separate archive' scenerio without much difficulty, but some people prefer these features to be available in an integrated GUI, and some of them are willing to pay for it. WinRAR does offer certain features that 7-Zip doesn't, such as integrated recovery records and higher flexibility in creating archives. (I didn't know Bandizip allows codepage selection when I made that comment, for that use case you may use Bandizip if you want something free.) Recently I made a comment about why some users might prefer WinRAR to 7-Zip.

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