RAR file extension

A file with extension RAR is the native format of WinRAR archiver. Like other archives, RAR files are data containers, they store one or several files in the compressed form. After you downloaded RAR file from Internet, you need to unpack its contents in order to use it.
Some RAR files can be parts of multi-volume sequences. In WinRAR you can split a huge archive to a few smaller files, which are called volumes. They may have extensions .rar (the first volume), .r00, .r01, r02, r03, r04, r05, ..., or .001 (the first volume), .002, .003, .004, .005, ..., or .part1.rar (the first volume), .part2.rar, ..., etc.
If you need to unpack rar volumes, place all them to the same folder and start extraction from the first volume.

RAR versus ZIP
Comparing to ZIP file format, RAR provides a number of advanced features: more convenient multipart (multivolume) archives, tight compression including special solid, multimedia and text modes, strong AES-128 encryption, recovery records helping to repair an archive even in case of physical data damage, Unicode support to process non-English file names and a lot more.

The native application for opening RAR files is WinRAR, but RAR is very popular archive format and many other compression utilities are able to open and extract RAR files such as: 7-zip, ZipZag, PeaZip.

How to open RAR files:

Use WinRAR for opening .rar archive files.

WinRAR provides the complete support for RAR files, so you can both create and unpack them. If you installed WinRAR on your computer and downloaded RAR file from Internet, you may double click on RAR file icon to open it in WinRAR, select all files, press "Extract To" button, enter a destination path and press "OK". Another way is to click on the RAR file in Explorer using the right mouse button. If you enabled "Shell integration" option when installing WinRAR, the file context menu will contain "Extract to ..." item.

How to convert file with extension RAR:

The simple way, how to convert RAR files to another compression or archive file format is to use WinRAR to decompress RAR archive. The extracted files can be then compressed by some another compression utility to your chosen archive or compression file format.

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RAR in WikiPedia

RAR in Google.com