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Recommend RAR program?

StuffIt Expander! Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time. 10 years ago, it was ubiquitous. Every mac had to have it, partly because their proprietary .sit (which should have been called .shit) standard was surprisingly popular. At that time, it was also the best rar unarchiver (IIRC).

Nowadays, I would just use TheUnarchiver for any unarchiving and SimplyRAR for any archiving. (You should also avoid RAR altogether except for multi-part fanedit uploads and stick with ZIP for everything else. In which case you can use the OSX Archive Utility.)
 
So SimplyRAR is looking better and better.

Though I see it's creator company went out of business too....
 
On Windows I am firmly of the opinion that 7-zip sets the bar for creating compressed files (not least because the 7z format lets you encrypt filenames as well as their contents, with 256bit AES encryption). On OS X I favour Keka (www.kekaosx.com) because it's essentially a 7-zip port for OS X. It's free to use, and currently maintained/developed.

That being said, I have just realised that neither 7-zip nor Keka support creation of RAR files, only their extraction. Is there a reason you specifically want to use RAR as a compressed format, out of curiosity?
 
Just converting my fan edit dvd into .rar files for uploading.

I finally settled on Simplyrar. Simple and straight forward. The only drawback you can not make the files any larger that 100MB. With RARMACHINE I could make 200MB part files, much easier to work with for uploading and downloading.
 
Yes, on the Mac Simplyrar seems the best option, with the 100mb drawback you mention.

EDIT: I had a bit here about the newsgroup program Unison's auto-rar function, but I think I was mis-remembering - it auto-joins and auto-UN-rars downloads, and it auto-segments and auto-PARs uploads, but I can't find anything stating it auto-RARs the upload before segmenting and creating PARs...I must have used Simplyrar before using Unison. Course, all of that is moot if you're not using the newsgroups :icon_e_wink:
 
Update: so there seemed one way around simplyrar's 100mb segment limit, if you're using newsgroups and Unison: make a single, unsegmented rar with Simplyrar, then upload that rar with Unison, because Unison's auto-segmenter will let you set your own size for the segments.

However, this turns out to be Not a Great Idea, because Unison segments with some kind of variation of HJSplit - and this can confuse some rar/newsgroup programs - some people had to first use Hjsplit to join the segments, and THEN un-rar the joined file.

Just posted to alert anyone who goes down this same path.
 
I know this is a bit of an old thread, but I thought I'd add my experience.

First, I have used SimplyRar and I agree that it is useful except for the 100MB size limit.

Since then, I have switched to using the command line version of rar, which lets you create whatever size chunks you want and essentially gives you all the power of rar. The drawback is that it is command line, so you have to be willing to use the terminal. Also, it is currently called a "trial" version (I have an earlier, shareware version installed that doesn't seem to have any limitations or expiration), which might have an expiration or other limitations. The cost of the software is $29. It's made by the same developer of WinRar, and is still actively developed and supported.

Anyway, here's a link to the download page (scroll down to find a link to the Mac OS X version of 4.2 which is the latest stable release; you can also live on the edge and download the 5.0 beta version. :))
http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm

At any rate, this is my command line to split a file into 200MB chunks:
Code: 
rar a -v200000k <name_of_rar_archive_to_create> <name_of_file_to_archive>

and that's it!

Again, I know some people want to stick to GUIs, and for that, SimplyRar is really the only choice (and unfortunately is no longer developed). But for those who are willing to give the command line a try, I'd recommend giving the above a whirl. I'm not yet sure if the trial version has limitations, but I plan on downloading it and trying it out, and will report back if I encounter any. Otherwise it would cost $29 dollars for a license.
 
seciors said:
Again, I know some people want to stick to GUIs, and for that, SimplyRar is really the only choice
Click to expand...

*cough winrar cough*
 
Frink, I think you forgot you are in the Mac forum...;-)
 
I didn't forget.

I didn't notice. :(
 
That's ok, we Mac people are used to it! :)

On topic, it's really too bad there are so few options out there for creating rar files on the Mac. I guess it's good we do have some options though, however paltry! Like I said, I will be switching to the latest version of rar and ill report back if I find any limitations based on it being "trial" software.
 
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