14 DAY TRIAL // WinRAR remains one of the most popular Windows applications out there, and recently, it received one of the most important updates in a long time.
WinRAR 6.0 is now available for download nearly 25 years after the application was first released, and needless to say, this release comes with massive improvements for the experience overall.
First and foremost, the dev team has added improvements for the rear error prompt – the screen you see when you are working with archives and you encounter an unexpected error.
Starting with this update, WinRAR no longer displays just the Retry and Quit options, but also additional options, such as Ignore All. This is something that comes incredibly handy, especially if you’re decompressing a large archive with tons of small files and some of them are locked.
“New options to the read error prompt have been added, which can save many hours of archiving if small locked files are encountered during a large backup procedure. "Ignore" allows to continue processing, with already read file parts only, and "Ignore All" does the same for all future read errors. For example, if the user archives a file which is partly locked by another process, and if "Ignore" is selected in read error prompt, it will save only a part of the file preceding the unreadable region into the archive. It can help to avoid interrupting lengthy archiving operations, but the user should know that files archived with "Ignore" are incomplete. The previously available "Retry" and "Quit" options are still present in read error prompt,” the dev team explains.
Then, WinRAR will now display a warning when you’re trying to close the app and an archive has been modified but an external app and it couldn’t save the changes to the archive. What’s more, the app now displays a list of the files that have been modified, and it provides users with options to either ignore the warning and close anyway or return to WinRAR.
There are also notable performance improvements, and the dev team says they focused on the operation of unpacking a file from a solid volume set.
“When unpacking part of a file from a solid volume set, WinRAR attempts to skip volumes in the beginning and will start the extraction from the volume closest to the specified file. By default, WinRAR resets the solid statistics in the beginning of large enough solid volumes when possible. For such volumes, extracting a part of the files from the middle of the volume set can be faster now but does not affect performance when all archived files are unpacked,” the release notes read.
Needless to say, there are also tons of bug fixes in WinRAR, so if you previously encountered a glitch when using the app, everything should now be working correctly after installing version 6.0.
Worth knowing WinRAR 6.0 doesn’t work on Windows XP, the super-old operating system that Microsoft abandoned six years ago. Windows XP no longer receives support since April 2014, and WinRAR is now giving up on it too, thus offering compatibility only for Windows Vista and newer (Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10). Of course, dedicated versions of WinRAR for other systems are also available, and the devs have created command-line flavors for macOS and Linux too.
WinRAR 6.0 is available in over 40 languages and can be downloaded in both 32-bit and 64-bit packages for Windows systems.