Comments

riredale wrote on 9/26/2008, 8:22 PM
Typing "Winrar recovery rate" into Google delivered a bunch of hits on password-cracking software for rar files. Rar, like Zip, is a data compression technology that also allows for password protection. My guess is that the encryption strength is pretty good, because all those programs indicated on Google touted their ability to do a brute-force attack quickly. In other words, try every possible combination of not only dictionary words but also random letters and hope for the best.
Butch Moore wrote on 9/26/2008, 8:33 PM
Yeah...my Google search returned the same. Way too much to sort through on a Friday night

I received a video clip that was "rar'd". Unpacking it was no a problem. The sender mentioned it had a "3% recovery rate". Thought it would be smarter to ask you guys what the heck it's about.
Bob Greaves wrote on 9/26/2008, 9:12 PM
Some video will not compress as much. Perhaps they meant to say it was a 3% compression rate. That is making it a RAR file only saved 3%
Laurence wrote on 9/26/2008, 9:35 PM
The other advantage to RAR archiving is that it lets you save big files like disc images in smaller incremental files for easier downloading and computer transfer.
TheFork wrote on 9/27/2008, 8:51 AM
RAR has the ability to build-in a certain amount of headroom that can be used to recover the contents of the archive if it's partially corrupted. Say you have a 20MB file that gets RAR'd to 10MB. The person who RAR'd the file will have ticked the "put recovery record" option and then chosen "3%" as the value. The resultant RAR file will then be 10.03MB (10MB + 3%) so that if the file was corrupted along the way to you then WinRAR would still be able to decompress the file WITHOUT error as long as no more than 3% was corrupted.