• Hakuso@scribe.disroot.org
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    8 hours ago

    RAR files just make me “Huh?” as they are nowhere near as good as 7zip, as universal as zip, or as nice as tarballs.

    The memory of multi-part rar files being a good way to get big things voer dial-up is kinda long past, they’re a relic, in my book.

    • fizzle@quokk.au
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      4 hours ago

      I think theyre still popular on Usenet.

      IDK all the history but rar has built in ability to create recovery data / parity volumes.

      Parity data is like additional data that can help reconstruct any degradation.

      That said, usually a standalone parity generator is used which can work with other types of archives, but rar is what everyone uses so why change.

      Compression algos are ineffective on encoded / compressed media anyway.

      It used to be important on Usenet, and maybe still is, because if a drive starts to fail somewhere and contains errors those errors can be reproduced across the network. Not sure if thats still a thing or why but certainly 10 years ago it was.

      The summary to this rambling comment is: some communities still like rar because its what they’ve always used and there’s no benefit to adopting 7z.