Difference Between ZIP and RAR

邮政编码vs RAR

邮政编码and RAR are widely used file formats for data compression. Data compression is the process of reducing the size of data. It uses an encoding scheme, which encodes the data using a less number of bits than the original data. In addition to compressing data, ZIP also supports archiving. A ZIP file could be made up of several files that are compressed or stored without compressing. RAR (Roshal Archive) is also a file format that supports file spanning in addition to data compression.

What is ZIP?

邮政编码is a file format that supports data compression and archiving. Originally created in 1989 by Phil Katz, today ZIP is supported by many software including the built-in ZIP support provided by the Windows operating systems And Mac OS X (versions 10.3 and later). Typically, the file extensions “.zip” or “.ZIP” and MIME media type application/zip are used for ZIP files. ZIP can be used to archive multiple files and the compression is optional when archiving. If compression is used for an archive, then it is applied on separate files. 32-bit CRC algorithm is used in ZIP format. To increase the safety of data, ZIP includes two copies of the archive directory structure. ZIP format supports compression methods such as DEFLATE, BZIP2, LZMA (EFS), WavPack, PPMd, etc. One advantage in ZIP format is that since it does the compression of files in an archive separately, the files could be randomly accessed. In addition, the user has the option to apply different compression algorithms to different file types to obtain better compression. Password-based symmetric encryption is supported with ZIP.

What is RAR?

RAR也是数据压缩和归档格式。它是由Eugene Roshal开发的，并使用文件扩展名.rar用于数据卷集和.rev恢复卷集。RAR中使用的压缩算法是封闭算法。当前RAR版本（版本3）中，使用了基于LEMPEL-ZIV（LZSS）和通过部分匹配（PPM）压缩预测的压缩方法。只有Winrar等商业软件才能用于创建RAR文件。可以使用Winzip，Rarzilla，7-Zip，Izarc，Peazip，Zipeg等的第三方软件来读取RAR文件。通过创建RAR文件时创建“恢复量”，可以重建缺少文件。

What is the difference between ZIP and RAR?

尽管ZIP和RAR压缩数据ion and file archiving formats, they have some differences. Compressing data using RAR will be slower than compressing the same data using ZIP. But RAR can achieve a better rate of compression than ZIP. Creating RAR files would require proprietary software such as WinRAR, but unpacking RAR files could be done using many free software. On the other hand, lot of commercial and open source tools and libraries are available for ZIP. The minimum size allowed for a ZIP file is 22 bytes, whereas the minimum size of a RAR file is 20 bytes. Maximum size of a standard ZIP file is 4 GiB (2³²-1) and the maximum size of a RAR file is 8 Exabytes (2⁶³-1）。