WinRAR 6.20 with improved repair command efficiency and faster RAR5 compression

WinRAR 6.20 is now available. The latest version of the compression program comes with a long list of improvements and changes. Notable additions include faster RAR5 compression in certain situations, improved repair command efficiency and automatic password processing.

WinRAR 6.20 follows WinRAR 6.10, which RARLAB released in January 2022 and the smaller release WinRAR 6.11. Beta testing of WinRAR 6.20 began in October 2022.

WinRAR 6.20

The official changelog lists new features, improvements and bug fixes. Here is a detailed summary on the most important changes in the new release:

• Improved RAR5 compression "of poorly compressible data" on CPUs with eight or more execution threads.
• Efficiency of the repair command improved for "shuffled data blocks" in recovery record protected RAR5 archives.
• If the option "autodetect passwords" is set in Organize Passwords, WinRAR will use passwords automatically for RAR 5.0 and ZIP archives. WinRAR users find the option under File > Set Default Password > Organize Passwords.
• Save original archive name and time under Options allows users to save these. Archives that contain the information display them under Info when using the Show information command. These can also be restored.
• ZIPX decompression of archives that contain file references supported.
• Decompression of .zst long range mode archives with a dictionary size that exceeds 128 megabytes supported.
• A 30 second prompt is displayed to the user if the archiving options "turn off PC", hibernate, sleep or "Restart PC2 are selected. If no user selection occurs in 30 seconds, the action is carried out.
• Open in internal viewer option of the context menu in WinRAR. It can be useful to view raw data of the archive using the internal viewer.
• The recovery record size is displayed on the archive page of the file properties in Explorer.
• When adding files to encrypted solid RAR5 archives, a password is required. If the password is not correct, the dialog will be displayed again. Previously, the operation was cancelled.

WinRAR 6.20 includes several bug fixes next to improvements. The new release fixes a memory leak when "reading contents of .tar.bz2 archives", a crash when unpacking files from specially crafted ZIP archives, and a bug that caused archive modification commands to fail for certain ZIP archives with file comments.

WinRAR 6.20 users may install the new version to upgrade the compression software. All downloads are as usually available on the official website.

Now You: which compression tools do you use?

WinRAR 6.20 with improved repair command efficiency and faster RAR5 compression