Work with archives. How to open rar file?

In one of the previous articles, I talked about file extensions. Now I want to detail the specific addition .rar, which symbolizes the archive. From this article you will learn what the archive format is and how to open the .rar file

What are archives? How are they created?

When you see the file extension, you set it to belong to a particular data type. If before you are extensions of type .rar, this indicates the existence of an archive. The archive is a backup of the data, which is compressed to save space on the media. That is, the size of this copy on average 30-40% may be less than the original. And before opening the rar file, it is extracted to the original size. To extract such a file without data loss, you need a special program-archiver. It is she who is engaged in packing the original data in the archive and then unpacking them.

Than to open a file rar? Archiver

First, you need to install a program for archiving data to a PC hard drive. This can be done in two conflict-free ways:

• Download and install some free file packer to disk;
• Purchase a paid archiver and also install it on your computer.

More often users of runet use programs winrar and 7-zip. I would even recommend installing them together to get an expanded set of all the archiving options.

During the installation, follow the prompts of the wizard. After installation, run the application's main executable file. Usually it is indicated by a special desktop shortcut.

Now you can see the window manager like windows explorer. How to open a rar file in it? It is necessary to click on the icon of the archive file twice, and you will see the internal contents of the archive. In this case, compressed data is extracted to a temporary folder and is available for viewing.

To unzip the backup copy to a specific directory in the winrar or 7-zip manager, right-click on it and select "extract files" from the drop-down list . The program for archiving will offer you to choose a directory for unpacking the archive and, if necessary, some additional extraction parameters.

In the archive manager interface, select the partition and folder where you want to unzip the selected files. If you want to create a new empty directory, just write its name in the extraction path, and the program will automatically create it.

Click "apply" or "ok" (depends on the interface of the working archiver). The process of extracting the archive will begin, which will be the answer to the question of how to open the rar file. The time it takes is proportional to the size of the extracted content.

Recommendation for speed

I have repeatedly noted that it's very quick to extract large files and .iso images are just 7-zip. Therefore, if opening by other archivers takes a long time, try using this application, perhaps the process will go with great acceleration.

How can I open the rar file from the My Computer menu?

It is not always convenient to use the built-in archiver interface. In this case, right-click the command submenu directly from the windows explorer and find in it something like "extract to the specified directory". Thus, the installed archiver prescribes the list of its commands in the shell windows. Well, then the process is similar to the above described actions for extracting archives.

Additional Backup Commands

How to open a rar file with help of auxiliary commands? In the same conductor, we call the context submenu and, as a rule, we find the following archiving tasks:

• Extract to a folder with the name of the archive - creates a working subfolder with the name as the archive in the current folder, and the contents are unpacked there.
• Extract to the current folder - extract the archive data to the directory in which you are now. No additional subfolders are created.
• Add to archive - opens a window interface where you can add the selected data to an existing backup.
• Add to ... (archive name) - adds the selected data to a new backup, the name of which the user comes up with.