• NateNate60@lemmy.mlEnglish
      886·
      1 year ago

      I never understood the appeal of paid programs. 7-Zip works equally well and is free and open source software. It integrates much nicer into File Explorer as well.

      • Obinice@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4823·
        1 year ago

        I agree that 7zip is great (albeit based in Russia, so not something I’m sure I want to support at the moment), but consider for a moment that winrar licencing is primarily aimed at businesses (which is why they don’t bother locking personal users out after the trial ends), and for that money you get a certain guarantee of functionality and stability over a long period of time.

        There’s absolutely no guarantees that 7zip will continue to be developed, or that it will retain it’s current features and functionality - the developer can turn it into a Minesweeper clone if they feel like it, and there’s nothing a business can do but keep using an outdated and thus potentially dangerous version that will eventually become unusable.

        You also get a certain level of customer service and corporate communication between the purchasing company and the production company to help resolve issues, which may not exist at all with the alternative.

        It’s also not always wise to have your business rely heavily on a tool that only sees development through volunteer work by a limited number of disparate people that may come and go, and while I don’t know how large the volunteer base is that works on 7zip (it could be just the one guy, it could be a hundred people), to a company it’ll never feel as reliable an option as relying on a tool that sees development and maintenance through a paid, full time staff at an established legal entity company with an established reputation.

        And speaking for a moment to that established company bit, consider that winrar’s company is based in Berlin, within the European Union and under it’s rules and laws, which is a far better proposition from a company’s standpoint than having to legally deal with an individual guy inside the Russian Federation, especially one that hasn’t actually sold your business a product at all.

        Anyway, just a few potential thoughts for why tools that do the same job might be preferred by a business, sorry it got a bit long 😅

        • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
          342·
          1 year ago

          7zip is FOSS, GPL license. Even if the author stops others can step in. Even if nobody does and it stops being actively developed you’ll still be able to extract your archives for the foreseeable future. You can still unpack ARC files from the 80s.

        • Rolder@reddthat.comEnglish
          31·
          1 year ago

          I mean, does paying for winrar somehow guarantee that it will keep being actively developed?

          • sethboy66@kbin.social
            96·
            1 year ago

            No, the fact that businesses pay for it for something of that guarantee despite there being free peer-alternatives means that it is a better guarantee.

            When you see businesses electing to pay for something despite free alternatives, there is likely a reason (or a number of them). I’ve seen free tools go from active maintaining to completely dead in a single update due to the work needed to get it back up and operating with new environment-side changes.

            • AbidanYre@lemmy.worldEnglish
              5·
              1 year ago

              I’ve seen free tools go from active maintaining to completely dead in a single update

              And we’ve all seen companies go out of business overnight. There’s no more guarantee that WinRAR will still be around tomorrow than there is for 7z.

        • SaraIsabella@lemmy.worldEnglish
          8·
          1 year ago

          Just because someone was born in Russia does not make them a specific type of person. Nobody chooses where or when they are born. 7-Zip has been for ages, and if something were to happen to it then im sure one of the dozen of forks around will take the role as the “main one”. However you are right, companies desire something predictable, stable. Which is why some companies like SUSE, Red Hat, etc. Manage to sell FOSS. in fact i believe some of these distros include p7zip, and they freeze it to a specific version, security updates and bug fixes are backported.

              • kbotc@lemmy.worldEnglish
                32·
                1 year ago

                … You can’t edit files inside a zip file. The program’s just hiding that it’s decompressing and decompressing the whole thing every time you change something.

                Zip files are usually just another wrapper around DEFLATE, and compressing each block requires knowledge of the previous block’s compression (Part of LZ77). It’s a streaming format, not a sparse format.

                • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  If you edit a text file, it actually just creates a new file because inserting text in the middle means all of the text after changes position. I’d still call that editing an existing file rather than creating a new file based on the previous one plus some edits. The second description might be more technically accurate but it’s just unnecessary technical details because it’s effectively the first description.

                  Even going back to the original use of edit, editors would mark up books or articles and then a new copy would need to be created with those edits. I’m having trouble thinking of any cases where edit truly means “change something in place without making a new copy of it with the changes included”. I guess small edits with pencil or whiteout can sometimes work.

      • narc0tic_bird@lemm.eeEnglish
        133·
        1 year ago

        I like WinRAR for its built-in parity functionality. You can achieve similar results with 7-Zip using PAR2, but having it built right into WinRAR with two options (add a recovery record to each archive, or create separate recovery archives (basically what PAR2 does)) is so much more convenient.

        WinRAR is like what…? 30-35 bucks? That’s per user, unlimited machines, lifetime license. More than fair I’d say.

      • TheMadnessKing@lemdro.idEnglish
        66·
        1 year ago

        WinRAR has so much better UI than 7zip.

        I will honestly move away from WinRAR if something better with dark theme is launched.

        • AProfessional@lemmy.worldEnglish
          10·
          1 year ago

          Implementing support for a widely used format isn’t “basically copied” and there have been alternatives for decades.

        • glimse@lemmy.worldEnglish
          6·
          1 year ago

          Back in the Windows 7 days you could use 7zip. I’ve been using it since like XP

  • 790@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    411·
    1 year ago

    Interesting. About a month ago I joined the elite club of WinRAR licence owners.

    • HeneryHawk@thelemmy.clubEnglish
      71·
      1 year ago

      On a very very rare occasion I’ve had to use it for scene cracks as other apps didn’t work. They use WinRAR to archive it so on those very rare occasions it’s the only thing that unpacks it

    • ReluctantMuskrat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I bought a lifetime license literally more than 20 years ago to support the developer. I use 7Zip for most stuff but prefer WinRAR for split rar archive support.

    • severien@lemmy.worldEnglish
      22·
      1 year ago

      That’s, quite ironically, a pretty ignorant opinion. There are areas where WinRAR is stronger than 7zip.

      • kattenluik@feddit.nlEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        The person you replied to never mentioned 7-Zip, and there’s forks and other programs that are probably just as strong in the same areas.

        • severien@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          1 year ago

          “probably”

          The commenter implied that there’s a tool which is better than WinRAR in everything and therefore there can’t possibly be a reason to use WinRAR. Which application is it then?

          • kattenluik@feddit.nlEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            I’d need to know the areas you consider 7-Zip to be stronger in first, because I can’t think of anything myself.

            • severien@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              As an example, RAR provides parity records which allows recovery of large amounts of compressed data in case of data corruption. 7zip can lose all its content if one bit is flipped.

              RAR provides much more support for underlying file system support which makes it more suitable as an archival tool. Things like NTFS hard links, streams, ACLs, all three timestamps. 7zip doesn’t support that.

              WinRAR in general has way more niche features for advanced use cases, while 7zip focuses on the basics.

    • _Hadek@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      1 year ago

      This!

      I used winrar at first, but never truly trusted 7zip. Didn’t like the way it looked. Then first time I learned about ninite, I saw peazip and never looked back.

      With the soon to be supported .rar on windows 11 I might do away with it but I feel peazip works faster.