Download WinRAR 3.30 beta 1

Version 3.30 beta 1 of the popular (de)compression program WinRAR has been released. In this version some bugs have been squashed and of course some new things have been added as well. This includes a number of features to better deal with large TAR, GZIP and ISO9660 files, and the number of options for directly editing archives has also been greatly increased. In version 3.30 29 things have changed, which here can be found, but – traditionally – are also listed below:

1. The new command “Check archive for viruses” extracts an archive to a temporary folder and checks its contents with antivirus software installed on your computer.

2. The new command “Generate Report” generates a report listing all common or archived files. It is also possible to add the file size, date and CRC, to determine the sort order, to save the report to a file and to send it to a printer or to copy to the clipboard.

3. The new “Benchmark and hardware test” command makes it possible to compare the performance of the RAR compression algorithm on different computers and detect possible errors caused by hardware failure.

4. The new “Print File” command allows to print archived and common files.

5. The “Tools” menu contains “Wizard”, “View Information”, “Convert Archives”, “Find Files”, “Restore Archive”, “Convert to SFX”, commands that were previously in the “Commands” menu. In addition, this menu contains the new commands “Check archive for viruses”, “Generate report”, “Benchmark and hardware test”.

6. WinRAR supports decompression of ZIP archives created using “Strike Shrink” method.

7. WinRAR pre-allocates disk space for files extracted from ZIP archives. Prevents disk fragmentation, specifically on NTFS drives. Previous versions only did this with RAR archives.

8. It is now possible to extract TAR, GZIP and ISO9660 archives of any size. Previous versions could not handle files of the aforementioned sizes when they were larger than 2 GB.

9. The status bar shows the progress of the current operation when reading large .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 archives.

10. The “Next Volume” dialog box allows you to change not only a name, but also the size of the next volume, allowing you to create volumes of different sizes. This dialog box is displayed when you create volumes on removable drives or when you check the “Pause after each volume” option in the “Extended” tab of the “Archive name and parameters” dialog box.

11. A number of -v switches can be specified in command-line mode to specify different sizes for different volumes. For example, the command ‘rar a -v100k -v200k -v300k archivename’ sets a size of 100KB for the first volume, 200KB for the second volume, and 300KB for all subsequent volumes.

12. More WinRAR commands support Unicode in archive names. If your Windows is NT based (NT 4.0, 2000, XP and 2003), you can change archive names with non-English names regardless of the settings in “Regional Settings” (in the Control Panel).

13. Small and some large icons have been updated by Francesco Indrio.

14. The size of the “Diagnostic Messages” window can be changed. It keeps the new dimensions and restores them the next time this same window is displayed.

15. The “Mode…” button in archive progress window allows to directly change the compression method and the option “Shut down PC when ready”.

16. WinRAR supports the -cfg- switch in command line mode. This forces WinRAR to ignore options stored in the default compression profile and in the RAR environment variable.

17. WinRAR opens .qpr and .qpk files (QNK packages) in a single step, as it already did for .tar.gz archives.

18. The Extract command suggests browsing for a missing CAB file in a multivolume CAB archive instead of the “Unable to open” error.

19. The “Rename” command displays a window with information about the progress of processing the files.

20. The “Convert” command checks the lowest allowed compression ratio before starting the archive test, so that in a situation where the resulting archive is too large, WinRAR does not waste time testing it.

21. The “Files to exclude” field in the “Archive name and parameter” dialog now has an “Attach” button, which makes it possible to browse for files to exclude instead of entering these names manually.

22. WinRAR understands quotes within parameters in command line mode. For example, “-pmypassword” and -p”mypassword” set the same password. Previous versions of WinRAR only supported the first method (“-pmypassword”) and only the command-line version of RAR supported both methods.

23. The data analysis module is tuned to more accurately recognize executables and sound files. Wrong selection of algorithms for executable files and sound files could cause the compression ratio to be reduced in some situation.

24. WinRAR understands the -hp switch in command-line mode without a parameter behind it and asks for a password when processing it.

25. WinRAR retains NTFS streams of updated archives when the archive and temporary files both reside on an NTFS partition. For example, if you provide comments in the “Summary” section of the archive properties, they will not be lost when you update such an archive with WinRAR. Don’t mess up NTFS streams from the archive itself and streams from archived files; the latter can be kept longer.

26. It is possible to prohibit change of archive password with registry value “WinRARPolicyPassword”. This option can help prevent encryption of important data in a multi-user environment. Read the help topic “Configuration Settings/Registry Variables” for more information.

27. The “Choose Toolbar Buttons” dialog box allows you to specify separator bars after any desired button.

28. The new -st . switch[naam] for command line version of RAR allows you to compress data coming directly from stdin (the default input).

29. The command ‘vt’ and ‘lt’ of the command line version of RAR display target names in the form of symbolic links, when displaying a list of RAR/Unix archives containing symbolic links. These commands also display NTFS stream names when listing WinRAR archives containing streams.[break]As usual, this version is available in multiple languages ​​and for multiple operating systems.
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