rar vs zip difference

Notes

2024/11/07 Wednesday

Sometimes, you need to work with compressed formats. After comparing the advantages and disadvantages of each format, I found that although there is a lot of information online, there isn't a complete, unified summary, so I decided to put one together.

I. Principle

Compression is used to reduce file size for easier storage and transmission. Compression can be either lossless or lossy, and archive files (such as .zip, .rar) fall under lossless compression.

II. Overview

• zip: Open-source, free software. It was the first to be released and is widely used. However, due to its simple format and lack of a standard, issues such as encoding problems in different languages, different compressed file checksums, and varying file timestamps can occur.
• rar: Patent-protected, paid software. RAR was named after its creator, and it was released slightly later than ZIP. Due to the existence of compression headers, compressing small files with RAR may sometimes result in a larger file size after compression.
• 7z/7-zip: Open-source, free software. The full name is 7-zip, and it's a relatively new player in the field. However, it prioritizes high compression rates, which makes it difficult to recover files when a compressed file is damaged.
• tgz/.tar.gz: Open-source, free software. tgz is a shorthand for .tar.gz, and it consists of two parts: tar (an archiving format that doesn't compress) and gz (a compression format that doesn't archive). These are often used together, with gz being an implementation of the zip algorithm.

III. Comparison

• Compression Rate: 7z > rar > zip = tgz
• Compression Speed: : 7z > rar > zip = tgz
• Decompression Speed: 7z < rar < zip = tgz
• Security: 7z = rar > zip = tgz

Ⅳ. Universality

• Zip:Zip has been around the longest and is widely supported on both Windows and Mac by default.
• Tgz:Tgz is the default compression format for Linux and is less common on other systems.
• RAR:RAR requires the commercial software WinRAR for creation, while other tools can only extract it.
• 7z:7z is a relatively new format, with fewer users, but it has great potential and is catching up.