RARlab released WinRAR 7 Beta today. This new version of the popular archiver comes with important changes, some of which affect backwards compatibility.
Note: the new version is released as beta. Don’t install and run beta software on production systems. Beta releases are ideal for testing purposes.
With that out of the way: you may download WinRAR 7 from the official website. The graphical user interface version is available for Windows; Linux and macOS devices may use a command line version.
Existing users may download and install the latest WinRAR over an existing installation.
Selecting Help > About WinRAR displays the current version.
WinRAR 7.0: Dictionary Size changes
The new release improves the handling of dictionary sizes in WinRAR. The new limit is 64 gigabytes, but it depends on the physical available memory on the device WinRAR is run on.
Any dictionary size may be selected in the new version, which means that you are no longer limit to certain values.
Dictionary sizes play a role when creating archives. Larger dictionary sizes may improve the compression rate “for large files with distant repeat blocks” according to the developers. Files like virtual disk images or collections of similar large files may benefit from this.
The new options introduce a backwards compatibility issue. Only WinRAR 7.0 can unpack archives with 4 GB or higher dictionary sizes.
This is an issue under certain circumstances, as users may need to upgrade to the new version to extract certain formats. Windows 11’s RAR extraction capabilities may not support this either in the beginning.
WinRAR displays a prompt to the user if the dictionary size exceeds the “Maximum dictionary size allowed to extract” preference. Select Options > Settings to change the value, which is set to 4 GB by default. There you may also set the sizes you want to see in the create archive menu.
The Command Prompt version, furthermore, blocks unpack events if the dictionary size exceeds 4 GB. The use of the parameters -md and mx allow the unpacking. MD and MDX allow setting the dictionary size; the latter is applied to the extraction only.
Other changes in the new WinRAR
The changelog lists other changes besides those already mentioned.
Another change that affects backwards compatibility is that WinRAR 7.0 can’t create RAR 4.x archives anymore. Compression is not affected and most users may not need to create this type of archives specifically.
New search algorithms may help improve the compression ratio for certain data sets. WinRAR’s compression ratio may improve for “big text files” when the feature is turned on. Downside is that it will increase memory usage and may reduce the compression speed.
In addition, exhaustive search may improve the compression ratio even further, but at the expense of speed.
WinRAR users may turn these features on or off under advanced compression parameters. Exhaustive search depends on Long Range Search, which means that it activates automatically.
Another useful feature is giving users control over “Mark of the Web”. This feature adds security zone information to files, which Widows and software may use for security purposes. Files may for instance load read-only, if they have the mark.
This functionality is found under Settings > Security.
Here is a short list of other important changes:
- Option to enable Attributes column under Settings > File List > Columns.
- Benchmark command supports exact number of threads and results copying to Clipboard.
- New “remove redundant folders from extraction path” option in Settings > Paths.
- Comments support Word Wrap now.
- Maximum path length is now 65535 characters.
- The archive formats .bz2, .lz, .tar.bz2, .tar.gz, .tar.lz, .tar.zs show dictionary sizes now.
- The new switch -ol blocks archiving and extracting symbolic links.
You can check out all of the entries here.
Closing Words
WinRAR 7.0 is a major new release. It improves the handling of dictionary sizes, but this may lead to some backwards compatibility issues.
Now You: do you use WinRAR?