Download WinRAR 6.21 Download | TechSpot

WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can back up your data, reduce the size of email attachments, open and extract RAR, ZIP as well as create new archives in these and other popular file formats. By consistently creating smaller archives, WinRAR is often faster than the competition.

Is WinRAR free?

WinRAR is available as a trial version with access to all features. After 40 days, you will get a pop-up prompting you to purchase the license, but you can continue to use the software without losing any functionality. A single WinRAR license costs $29, which will remove any pop-up messages.

Is WinRAR compatible with Windows 11?

WinRAR is fully compatible with Windows 11. It also has GUI elements that match the operating system, such as rounded corners and snap layouts.

Is WinRAR available for macOS?

WinRAR developers offer a macOS version they call RAR for macOS, but it’s just a command line application. macOS supports native zip compression, for RAR compression and a fully featured GUI we recommend The Unarchiver or Keka.

Characteristics

• WinRAR supports all popular compression formats (RAR, ZIP, CAB, ARJ, LZH, ACE, TAR, GZip, UUE, ISO, BZIP2, Z and 7-Zip).
• WinRAR is ideal for multimedia files. WinRAR automatically recognizes and selects the best compression method. The special compression algorithm compresses multimedia files, executable files and object libraries particularly well.
• WinRAR allows you to easily split archives into separate volumes, making it possible to store them on multiple disks for example.
• WinRAR is also ideal if you send data via the web. Its 128-bit password encryption and its authenticated signature technology will give you the peace of mind you’ve been looking for.
• WinRAR is shareware, which means you have the chance to test it thoroughly. The program can be used completely free of charge for 40 days.

Download notes: Alternatively, you can download the latest beta version of this software.

What is new

• Both file and folder change timestamps are restored when extracting TAR and TAR-based archives such as tar.gz and tar.bz2. Previously, only file modification timestamps were specified for these archive formats.
• Added decompression of .tar.zst archives with dictionary exceeding 128 MB. WinRAR 6.20 allowed such dictionary for .zst, but not for .tar.zst.
• Switches -ed and -e+d are also supported by ZIP archives. Previously they only worked for RAR archives.

Bug fixed:

• if unencrypted file was saved after encrypted in the same RAR archive and both files had been extracted in the same extract command, WinRAR 6.20 failed to extract the unencrypted file;
• in some cases, an incorrectly detailed file open error reason may appear in the second line of the open error message.

Previous release notes

• If the “Automatically detect passwords” option in the “Organizer Passwords” dialog box is enabled and passwords matching a processing archive are present among saved passwords, it is used automatically. This option applies only to archives in RAR 5.0 and ZIP formats, which allows to quickly confirm the validity of the password. There is a small chance of incorrect password recognition for ZIP archives if stored passwords do not include a correct one. If encrypted ZIP archive extraction fails, try disabling this option, re-extracting and entering a valid password manually.
• If the extract command only involves a part of the files in the RAR archive, the additional archive analysis is performed when the extraction is started. It helps to unpack file references correctly even if the reference source is not selected. It works for most RAR archives except volumes on multiple removable media and archives containing a very large number of references. Also, in some cases, such an analysis can help optimize the amount of processing data when extracting individual files from semi-solid archives created with -s and -se switches.
• The “Save original archive name and time” option on the “Options” page of the archive dialog allows you to save the original archive name and creation time. If the archive contains such saved names and times, they appear on the “Info” page of the “Show Info” command and can be restored on the “Options” page of the same command. Restoration involves renaming an archive to its original name and specifying the saved time as the time of creation and modification of the archive. Switch -ams or just -am along with archive modification commands can be used to save the archive name and time in command line mode. These saved parameters appear in the header of “l” and “v” commands and can be restored with the -amr switch combined with the “ch” command, for example “rar ch -amr arc.rar”. If -amr is specified, “ch” ignores other archive modification switches.
• Faster RAR5 compression of poorly compressible data on modern CPUs with 8 or more threads of execution. This applies to all methods except “Fastest”, where performance remains the same.
• “Repair” command efficiency is improved for scrambled data blocks in recovery record protected RAR5 archives
• If the file size has grown after archiving when creating non-solid RAR volumes, such a file is saved without compression regardless of volume number, provided that the file is not split between volumes. Previously it only worked for files in the first volume.
• Added decompression of .zipx archives containing file references, provided both reference source and target are selected and reference source precedes target inside the archive. Usually, if the .zipx archive includes file references, it is necessary to extract the entire archive to extract references.
• Added long range decompression of .zst archives with a dictionary exceeding 128 MB. Previously, it was possible to decompress them only if the dictionary was 128 MB or less.
• If the “Shutdown PC”, “Hibernate”, “Sleep” or “Restart PC” archiving options are enabled in WinRAR, a message to confirm or cancel the power management action is displayed right before starting it. If no selection was made by the user within 30 seconds, the proposed action is confirmed and started automatically. This prompt also appears for the -ioff switch in the WinRAR command line, but not in the console RAR command line.
• The context menu in the WinRAR file list provides the “Open in internal view” command for archive files. It can be useful if you want to see the archive’s raw data in the internal viewer. For example, to read an email archive with UUE attachments included. Regular “Show” command always shows the archive contents. If the file is recognized as a UUE archive, “View” will show UUE attachments.
• The recovery record size is displayed on the “Archive” page with file properties invoked from the Explorer context menu for RAR5 format archives. Previously it was just “Present” instead of exact size for RAR5 archives.
• When archiving from stdin with the -si switch, RAR displays the current amount of read bytes as a progress indicator.
• If the wrong password is specified when adding files to encrypted solid RAR5 archive, a password will be requested again. Previous versions aborted archiving in this case.
• If both options “Test archived files” and “Delete attribute “Archive” after compression” or their command line -t -ac equivalents are enabled during archiving, the “Archive” attribute will be deleted only if the test was successful. Previously, it was deleted even when tests reported errors.
• The NoDrives value containing the bitmask to hide drives can now be read from the “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\WinRAR\Policy” registry key, allowing it to be included in winrar.ini if ​​needed. Its “Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies” locations in HKEY_CURRENT_USER and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE are also supported. Previously, only “Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies” in HKEY_CURRENT_USER was recognized.

Error fixed

• archive modification commands may fail for some ZIP archives with file comments
• fixed a memory leak when reading the contents of .tar.bz2 archives
• if the source and the resulting archive format are the same, the archive conversion command did not set the original archive time of a newly created archive even if the “Original archive time” option was selected in the archive parameters
• if the “Merge Volume Contents” option in “Settings/File List” was enabled, the folder size in the WinRAR file list may be smaller than expected when browsing the contents of a multi-volume archive. It did not include the packed size of file shares that continued from the previous volume into the calculation
• even if the “Set file security” extraction option was turned off by default, extract commands in the Explorer context menu still attempted to recover NTFS file security data
• WinRAR could read data beyond the end of the buffer and crash when extracting files from specially created ZIP archives. We are grateful that Bakker is working with the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative to notify us of this bug