Rar5 can optionally create a 'quick open record', a special archive block at the end of the file that contains the names of files included, allowing archives to be opened faster. Rar4 archives had to be parsed before opening as file names were spread throughout the archive, slowing operation particularly with slower devices such as optical drives, and reducing the integrity of damaged archives. Optional 256-bit BLAKE2 file hash instead of a default 32-bit CRC32 file checksum.Optional AES encryption increased from 128-bit to 256-bit.Support for Unicode file names stored in UTF-8 format.Maximum path length for files in RAR and ZIP archives is increased up to 2048 characters.

Maximum compression dictionary size increased to 1 GB (default for WinRAR 5.x is 32 MB and 4 MB for WinRAR 4.x).5.0 – supported by WinRAR 5.0 and later.Support for Unicode file names stored in UTF-16 little endian format.Support for archive files larger than 9 GB.Optional creation of 'recovery volumes' (.rev files) with redundancy data, which can be used to reconstruct missing files in a volume set.Improves compression algorithm using 4 MB dictionary size, Dmitry Shkarin's PPMII algorithm for file data.Encryption of both file data and file headers.2.9 – released in WinRAR version 3.00.Introduces archives data recovery protection record.Multimedia compression for true color bitmap images and uncompressed audio.2.0 – released with WinRAR 2.0 and Rar for MS-DOS 2.0 features the following changes:.1.3 – the first public version, does not have the 'Rar!' signature.The minimum size of a RAR file is 20 bytes. Version 3 of RAR is based on Lempel-Ziv ( LZSS) and prediction by partial matching (PPM) compression, specifically the PPMd implementation of PPMII by Dmitry Shkarin. Roshal, the elder brother of Eugene Roshal, owns the copyright. RAR compression applications and libraries (including GUI based WinRAR application for Windows, console rar utility for different OSes and others) are proprietary software, to which Alexander L. Numbers were used in the file extensions of the smaller files to keep them in the proper sequence. Previous versions of RAR split large archives into several smaller files, creating a 'multi-volume archive'. 2.3 Third-party software for extracting RAR files.

Are .rar files safe