With that setting the compression is automatically done (inline compression) when you copy the file to storage. In summary: it's a personal choice :)If you are that focused on compressing files you can use Xigmanas or Freenas to create a dataset with gzip or lz4 compression. On the other hand, I think WinRAR gives user more control over compression settings -to save as much space as possible.īogdanH said:In my experience, for average home user it doesn't matter much which one you prefer to use -they both work and I have installed both. Other than that, my impression is, that 7-zip is faster at decompression -again only maybe important at big amount of data. means, if you repeatedly compress big amount of the same type of data, then it's worth to check which of these two does better job for you (so you can save some storage space). If you compress big amount (GB's) of files then depending on content of files, sometimes 7-zip is better compressor and sometimes rar is better. It didnt affect extracting the entire archive, which was performed correctly files in Unix ARJ archives could be erroneously displayed as folders in WinRAR file list 'Display files in Explorer.

On the other hand, 7-zip can open/extract some additional formats (ISO, wim, etc.) extracting individual files from solid archives created by RAR versions older than 2.0, could fail in WinRAR 6.20 and 6.21. I mostly use WinRAR because it has more 'friendly' UI (for compression and other settings) and it also can compress/decompress zip files and decompress 7-zip files. In my experience, for average home user it doesn't matter much which one you prefer to use -they both work and I have installed both.

Hotaru251 said:what is the benefit to using winrar over say 7zip?

Instaling WinRAR 6.23