• kratoz29@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      What the hell, how so?

      Now that I think about it not much software comes in rar nowadays.

      • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
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        5 months ago

        Because it’s a garbage proprietary format that needs extra software on every OS. But for some inane reason it’s become the standard for piracy stuff. I think that’s the only reason it’s still alive.

        • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          It’s not garbage. It’s used in the pirate community and elsewhere because back in the day things were shared on the Usenet before they were shared anywhere else. There’s a limit for file size on the Usenet, so we needed to be able to break compressed files into multiple parts and have an easy way to put them back together when uncompressing. Win Zip did not have that functionality. You can thank WinRar for powering the entire sharing scene for decades. When torrent was becoming popular NO distributors shared on torrent. They shared on the Usenet. Then someone would take a Usenet share and post it to the torrent network. Torrent wouldn’t have had much success, or would have taken much longer to catch on if it wasn’t for WinRar and the Usenet.

          • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
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            5 months ago

            There’s a limit for file size on the Usenet

            No, there is no limit on the file size on usenet. There’s a limit on the individual article size, but larger files just require more articles.

            The reason why files were split on usenet was completion and corruption, and probably also media size originally. Say you need to post a 700MB file to alt.binaries.erotica.grannies.diapers, then you could just split those 700MB into 477867 articles of 1.5kB each, but if a single article is then corrupted or dropped, then nobody can get the file. If you split the 700MB into 35 files of 20MB each, and each 20MB file into 13654 articles, then a dropped article only corrupts a single file. Add to that, that completion issues often occured (or is it occurs? it’s been a long while since I got my Linux iso files from usenet) close to each other. So there might be a bunch of corruption in a single file, but everything else is fine. This is useful if your main provider was your ISPs complimentary usenet server, and you only got the rest from a pay by download service.

            About the media comment earlier, I can’t be sure. I wasn’t around in the early days, but I know that the 700MB file size for movies came from the limitations of CDs. Splitting files can quite possibly stem from some similar restrictions on a removable media.

            You can thank WinRar for powering the entire sharing scene for decades

            And the saints behind winrar for only bugging you to pay. TBH first time installing 7z on a new windows install, instead of winrar, felt a bit sad.

            • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              Yeah, meant article size. I said file size to simplify the point and not get too heavy into how the Usenet works, but you explained it perfectly.

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          5 months ago

          RAR has internal file checking and redundancy that allows it to recover from a level of transmission errors. Some of the more clandestine ways pirate teams transfer things are by means that aren’t totally reliable, so this is very important. BitTorrent uploaders tend to take the file exactly as they get it, so there you go.

          BitTorrent has more sophisticated ways of checking correctness than RAR, so it’s not really necessary. It’s just too much effort for uploaders to bother.

        • shalafi@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Windows opens RAR files right out the box. Just tested.

          And if you need a separate unzipper for whatever reason, 7-Zip opens all the things.

          • lunarul@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            That’s because you’re not getting them from the original source. Scene releases come in multi-volume zipped rars. I don’t know why they need to be double archived, but they are. But lots of people will take those, unarchive, then re-upload or put them up in a torrent.

  • db2@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    For a few hundred kilobyte file sure, the difference is like pocket change. For a larger one you’d choose the right tool for the job though, especially for things like a split archive or a database.

    • Im_old@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Username checks out! Also you’re absolutely right, just last month I was looking for the best compression algorithm/packages to archive a 70gb DB

  • aard@kyu.de
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    5 months ago

    Nowadays it matters if you use a compression algorithm that can utilize multiple cores for packing/unpacking larger data. For a multiple GB archive that can be the difference between “I’ll grab a coffee until this is ready” or “I’ll go for lunch and hope it is done when I come back”

      • aard@kyu.de
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        5 months ago

        I personally prefer bzip2 - but it needs to be packed with pbzip, not the regular bzip to generate archives that can be extracted on multiple cores. Not a good option if you have to think about Windows users, though.

        • quicksand@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          Ah I have to use Windows for work and that’s the source of most of my compression needs. Thanks for the info though, I’ll look into this

    • dustyData@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Because gzip and bz2 exists. 7z is almost always a plugin or addon, or extra application. While the first two work out of the box pretty much everywhere. It also depends on frequency of access, frequency of addendum, size, type of data, etc. If you have an archive that you have to add new files frequently, 7z is gonna start grating on you with the compression times. But it is Ok if you are going to extract very frequently from an archive that will never change. While gz and bz2 are overall the “good enough at every use case” format.

        • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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          5 months ago

          Windows having tar.gz support is great.

          I have scripts for generating log bundles on user computers and sending to a share. tar.gz is great for compressing ~2.5GB text to send over VPN, and then I can open the .tar.gz direct from the network drive with minimal additional delay opening a 500MB text file inside.

    • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
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      5 months ago

      For archiving/backupping *NIX files, tar.whatever still wins as it preserves permissions while 7z, zip and rar don’t

      Oh, and while 7z is FOSS and supported out of the box on most Linux desktop OSes and on macOS, Windows users will complain they need to install stuff to open your zip. Somehow, tar.gz is supported out of the box on Linux, macOS, and yes Windows 10 and 11!

  • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
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    5 months ago

    Now we have so much bandwidth it doesn’t matter

    Squints eyes

    Now we just don’t care about even the slightest modicum of efficiency

  • Swarfega@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    In the early days of the internet, WinZip was a must have tool. My college had a fast internet connection. I say fast but I bet it was less than 1Mb shared between everyone. Way faster than the 33k modem I had at home.

    I used my college connection to download so much and then took it home on floppy disks. For files larger than 1MB I’d use WinZip to split files up.

    • BigFig@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      And then you get it all off the floppy’s only to realize 10% of it is corrupted

        • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          And that’s when you learned about parity files…

          When par2 came out that was huge for me. Didn’t use floppies anymore, but the ability to only download the required amount of parity blocks was great.

  • kepix@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    still using 7z. less space, and easier to browse, since the operating system doesnt have to deal with all the files, easier for the cloud to tag. not caring about space makes the storage more expensive, even games are bigger now with little to none content.

  • azimir@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    How about when peoples websites would put the sizes of linked images and files so you could estimate how long it would take to download a given image and such? Basically anything 30KB and above would have a size warning attached.

    • KickMeElmo@sopuli.xyz
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      5 months ago

      Depends on what you’re doing. Dumps of multitrack CD media should always be bin+cue or a compressed version thereof, such as chd. DVDs and Blu-rays can dump as iso. There are also some extremely niche cases such as specific copy protection that require mdf+mds for a proper dump, but that won’t be something the average user ever encounters. Basically, those formats exist and are still used for a reason, whether you understand them or not.

      I do reserve some hatred for people who dump PS1 games as iso, or who use ccd+img+sub for things where the subchannels have no valid usage.

    • aeronmelon@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      1:1 copies of the bits on the disc is a valid option that some people prefer. Especially if you want to make your own physical disc or make compressed files encoded in a very specific way. It’s also the most reliable way to archive a disc for long-term storage.