Roshal archive (RAR)

The RAR file format is a compression format with which any files can be compressed losslessly with a high compression rate. The RAR format is comparable to the ZIP file format and is suitable for archiving files. The file extension of RAR files is *.rar.

The RAR file format can compress any files. Before lossless compression, the data is sorted by file type. Like other lossless compression methods, RAR compression removes redundancies, resulting in a high compression ratio. Unlike ZIP compression, RAR can compress files of any file size and can also split large files.

Compressed RAR files are decompressed by unpacker software, such as 7-Zip, which can be downloaded as freeware from the net.