In this day and age, data is like currency. More data means more value and more advantages. It comes in all forms and, in digital formats, its usually audio and visual.
Factoring how wildly varied our gadgets are, ranging from tiny smartwatch to a supercomputer the size of a fridge. Since consuming or viewing data depends on the hardware’s capability, sharing and transferring data between gadgets can be a daunting task because the sheer variance of hardware power. Have you ever tried viewing a 1080p video on a 10 year old laptop? Exactly. This is where data compression becomes useful. It shapes the data to fit the hardware’s capability, ensuring the consumer can view and edit the data with maximum comfort and efficiency.
Introduction
Data compression is a process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original data, making it more streamlined and smaller. The main objective is to make the file easier to access, consume or transport
There are 2 kinds of data compression. Lossless, which removes only the unimportant bit of data while still retaining its ‘core’ data. This means compressed video will look and sound the same but will have a smaller size than the uncompressed version.
Then, there’s lossy, which removes the ‘core’ data for the sake of an even smaller size. A compressed video will look blurry from reduced resolution and will likely sound worse because of a reduced bit-rate. But will have even way smaller size than the uncompressed version. Have you ever watched movie in .gif format? That’s the magic of lossy compressing.
RAR
Stands for Roshal Archive, because it is made by Eugene Roshal on March 1993 and is licensed under WinRAR .GmbH. Is an archive file format that supports data compression, error recovery and file spanning. Mainly uses LZSS (Lempel–Ziv–Storer–Szymanski) and PPM (Prediction by Partial Matching) compression method.
Its main strength lies in the data partition function. It enables you to partition a large file into smaller chunks (will have extension name of r.00 r.001 r.002 and so on) which makes the proccess of transporting large data much easier.
RAR has AES-256 encryption which is superior to ZIP, which only has AES encryption
ZIP
Developed by PKWARE.Inc on 14 February 1989.Unlike RAR which is proprietary, Zip’s basic features are free, but advanced features are patented. Uses DEFLATE function to compress files. Has a wide support across almost all operating system.
ZIP is much more popular if compared to RAR because of its partially free source code. You can open ZIP file with only windows, unlike RAR which needs winRAR to open it. It has generally superior compression value, even though it still depends on what kind of file it is.
How Do You Convert RAR to ZIP?
We are going to use 2 most popular apps to do it, WinRAR and 7zip.
WinRAR
Step 1. Open your .RAR file using WinRAR.
Step 2. Click ‘Tools’ ,then choose ‘convert archive’. Or, simply press Alt+Q.
Step 3. Select which files you are going to convert which in this case, is just one rar containing one folder, then click on compression.
Then select the archive format to ZIP, and after that, click ok.
You can also select compression method, from fastest (less time consumed) to best (more compression but more time consumed). Additionally, you have the option to split the files into the size of your preference.
Click OK and wait for the proccess to finish. Congratulations! Your RAR is now ZIPped.
7zip
Right click your file, hover to 7-zip, and select add to “x .zip.”
Now wait for the app to finish its task.
And that’s it. Pretty simple right? the zipped file will be created within the same directory as your rar file, with the same name. Remember that this does come at a cost of virtually no options for compressing, unlike the WinRAR app.
Did this help? Let us know!