14 DAY TRIAL // RARLAB has released a major new version of the RAR archiving utility for Mac OS X adding the new RAR 5.00 archiving format, with Intel IA-32 executable and delta compression algorithms, and more.
RAR 5.00 decompression can take advantage of several CPU cores, so if you have a multi-core Mac you’ll see some lightning-fast archiving / de-archiving happening on your computer.
The new RAR 5.00 recovery record is more resistant to damage and can utilize partially corrupted data, according to the developers. Several changes have been made in the encryption algorithm. For instance, encryption has moved from AES-128 to AES-256 in CBC mode.
Another noteworthy encryption tweak, while producing large archives BLAKE2 can be used for file contents identification.
Some features have been removed in RAR 5.00 Beta 1, such as authenticity verification, and support for old style extension based arcname.rNN volume names.
Since RAR 5.00 is only at its first beta, do remember that that this is only a preliminary RAR build which shouldn’t be considered production-ready.