Trying to use Winrar as archiving tool...but it's slow

[DeadSeaSquirrels]

I was given the suggestion to Rar folders and files that I want to archive, and then archive it to a separate drive. And then I use MS scheduler (that one that is built into the OS) to update files every once in a while. I believe there is a command line option to rar only files that have changed for a directory that has already been Rar'd once already. But when I do it, it is really really slow. I thought it was suppose to take a long time for the first time, but then each successive updating time, it would be much faster. But when I try to update even just one file, it takes as long to do that one file as it does for the whole directory. Am I doing it wrong, or is that just how long it takes, because if that is the case, then it would be easier to just move the files to the separate directory instead of Raring it. What do you guys think?

 

[stevewm]

When you add a file to a RAR archive WinRAR has to scan the entire file, this is actually slower than just re-compressing the entire directory again, unfortunately all RAR compatible programs seem to operate this way. Must be a limitation of RAR files....

If you use the ZIP format it Adds files almost instantly.

 

[glugglug]

It does this only if you are working with a "solid archive" which gives you a slightly better compression ratio by resorting the files in the archive by extension and then compressing the concatenated data areas of all the files as one huge file.

If you turn solid archiving off it will recompress only the new/updated files like you are trying to do.

 

[stevewm]

Originally posted by: glugglug
It does this only if you are working with a "solid archive" which gives you a slightly better compression ratio by resorting the files in the archive by extension and then compressing the concatenated data areas of all the files as one huge file.

If you turn solid archiving off it will recompress only the new/updated files like you are trying to do.

Yes, but if you have a large archive, even if its not a solid archive it will still scan all the files in the archive, it doesn't recompess them, it just scans them before adding more files.. On a archive with a large number of files and directories it can take a few minutes to scan through.