How to open RAR files

RAR is a popular and reliable archive format. It was developed by Eugene Roshal, the Russian programmer. This format has come with WinRAR utility. But nowadays a variety of archivers can work with this extension. And RAR can be deciphered as Rorshal ARchiv. In 2004, Eugene delivered developer rights (and copyright) to his brother, Alexander. That’s the origin of RAR name.

There are two types of archivers. The first type provides compressing and decompressing options. The second one is only for extracting. Simple utilities, which haven’t additional settings, are related to the last type.

Many of archivers offer protection by password. You can encrypt your archive using this function. Some programs allow users to create solid, multi-part and multi-volume archives. Archivers can integrate into the context menu and compress a lot of files. That’s very helpful when you need to compress all files at once.

The most utilities are free in this list. But there is also paid software (as WinRAR) that provides supplementary functions. Almost all of them have Multilanguage support. You can download and compare their functionality. The list is valid for Windows platform.