SmartPAR --- such a freakin' cool program!!

[brxndxn]

I was downloading SHAREWARE (yea, that's right buddy, shareware!) the other day and four of the archive volumes were not downloaded with the program - and then it wasn't available to download any more (yup, RAR-compressed SHAREWARE was taken off the server).. Luckily, I noticed that there were a few .PAR, .P01, etc. files in the same directory with the same name as the rar files.

Anywhoo, after asking some people in a SHAREWARE chat room on IRC, they kindly let me know that they were SmartPAR archives.. and that each SmartPAR is capable of recovering ONE missing RAR file in a multi-volume archive. I thought this was too good to be true.. but I downloaded the program and it worked!! It recovered the SHAREWARE game! (all four archive volumes)..


I read some more about this program. For some reason, it absolutely amazes me.. I mean.. if you have ONE PAR volume and 99 out of 100 rar volumes, that PAR volume can recover ANY of the missing RAR volumes.. How the hell is this possible?

If you are missing 2 out of 100 rar volumes and you have one par volume, couldn't you theoretically recover one of the RAR archives.. then recover another with that PAR? I dunno.. Anyone have an idea how this works..

BTW, if you don't have the program, get it here

 

[LocutusX]

Yes, how nice you are recovering the missing RAR's in your pirate warez/vcd archive sets using SmartPAR. Good for you. Hooray. It works using principles of linear algebra which I suppose is too much for you to comprehend. And there are actually superior programs to SmartPAR, chief among them being FSRaid.

No, if you are missing 2 RAR volumes, you need 2 PAR's. You must recover all the missing files at once, which implies that you must have that requisite number of PAR's at that moment in time.

 

[brxndxn]

OOH... that makes it so much clearer to me..

BTW, I believe linear algebra comes after this semester (diffyQ)..