Making a winrar archive - Tutorial

Open Winrar, select your files to archive and click this button The General dialog

Archive name

Enter the name manually or press the "Browse" button to browse for the archive name. You may enter a name containing a disk letter or the full path to the archive. Profiles

Opens the menu allowing to create new, organize and select compression profiles. Compression profiles allow you to quickly restore previously saved compression options or to specify default options for this dialog. WinRAR provides a few predefined profiles optimized for creating e-mail attachments, backup files and other operations. See the topic Compression profiles for more information. Archive Format

Chose the format you want. If ZIP format selected, some advanced options, not supported by this archive format, will be disabled.

Compression method

When creating a new archive, you first need to select the archive format. ZIP is preferable only if you are not sure that a receiver of your archive has WinRAR. Otherwise it is recommended to select RAR, which supports more functions and higher compression. See RAR versus ZIP in the introduction topic. Regardless of the archive format the next step is the selection of compression method. Six compression methods are supported:
"Store", "Fastest", "Fast", "Normal", "Good" and "Best". The "Best" method provides highest, but slowest compression.
"Fastest" compresses poorly, but is very fast.
"Store" merges files into an archive without compression. If you create an archive for distribution or for long storage, probably you should ignore time and use the "Best" compression method to reduce the size as much as possible.
"Normal" compression is usually the best choice for daily backups.

If you selected the ZIP archive format, your preparations are finished on this stage. The features below are supported only by RAR archives.

The next parameter is dictionary size. It can be 64, 128, 256, 512 and 1024KB. Higher values of this parameter lead to better, but slower compression, so from this side it is similar to selecting compression method. Generally the best decision is to set the dictionary size to 1024KB and use the compression method to regulate the size/speed ratio. But a larger dictionary size requires more memory, memory usage can be estimated, approximately, as <> *5 + 2560 KB. If your computer has only 16 MB of memory, you should select a lower dictionary size value, for example, 256 KB. NOTE : that if you create a self-extracting archive using DOS SFX module, the dictionary size must be 64KB, because DOS SFX cannot handle larger dictionary. This limitation does not exist for other SFX modules.

NOTE : that neither compression method nor dictionary size change the extraction speed or extraction memory requirements.
The next option is solid archiving. This mode is explained in the Solid archives topic, so here only the main concept will be given. If you need to maximize compression - use solid mode, if you need to have maximum archive updating speed or if you want to minimize data losses in case of archive damage, do not use solid mode.

A special topic is multimedia compression. It tries to use an additional algorithm to improve compression of data such as digital audio, containing up to four 8-bit or two 16-bit channels or true color (24-bit) bit maps. Improvement in the compression ratio up to 30% over the normal compression may be achieved but when this method is applied to normal data, in most cases it will not change compression. It's possible that, when applied to normal data, compression may be only slightly improved or in some cases even decreased. NOTE : that this method cannot improve compression of already packed audio or graphics, so there is no sense to use it with JPEG or MPEG files. But it can show good results on unpacked WAV and true color BMP files.
These are all the main settings, which affect compression ratio and speed. Actually, you do not need to set them before each archiving. Simply select your favorite default values once in the default compression profile, which can be created from the "Compression settings dialog" and later you may change values in the "Archive name and parameters dialog" or using command line switches, when executing WinRAR from the command line. The only exception is archive format, which does not have a selection command line switch. Instead to overwrite the default archive format settings in the command line you should specify complete archive name with .RAR or .ZIP extension. In the WinRAR shell mode, the archive format can be selected in Archive name and parameters dialog in the same way as all other settings.

Volume size, bytes

By default it is entered in bytes. But if you add a lower case letter 'k' at the end of the volume size, the entered value will be considered as kilo bytes (multiplied by 1024). Use an upper case 'K' to denote thousand of bytes (multiply by 1000), 'm' means megabyte and 'M' - million of bytes. NOTE : that if you are archiving to a removable disk, you may select "Auto detect" from the list and WinRAR will choose the volume size automatically for each new volume.

Update mode

Add and replace files (default) :
Always replace archived files, which have same name as files to be added. Always add those files, which are not present in the archive.

Add and update files :
Replace archived files only if added files are newer. Always add those files, which are not present in the archive.

Freshen existing files only :
Replace archived files only if added files are newer. Do not add those files, which are not present in the archive.

Synchronize archive contents :
Replace archived files only if added files are newer. Always add those files, which are not present in the archive. Delete those archived files, which are not present in the added files. It looks similar to creating a new archive, but with the one important exception : if no files are modified since a last backup, the operation is performed much faster than the creation of a new archive.

Archiving options

Delete files after compression : The original files will only be deleted after a successful compression.

Create SFX archive

Creates a self-extracting archive (exe file), which can be unpacked without using any other programs. You may select the type of SFX module and set a few other SFX parameters like a destination folder in the Advanced options of this dialog.

Create solid archive

Creates a solid archive. Usually gives higher compression ratios, but applies some restrictions.

Put Authenticity verification

Put, in the archive, information concerning the creator, last update time and archive name. In archive management mode it is possible to read the authenticity information using the Show archive information.

Put recovery record

Adds the recovery record, which may help to restore an archive in case of damage. You may specify a size of the recovery record in the Advanced options of this dialog. But the default value is about 1 % of the total archive size.

Lock archive

A locked archive cannot be modified by WinRAR. You may lock important archives to prevent accidental modification.