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Also known as: WinRAR archive, .rar
A compressed archive format used to package Usenet releases before encoding. Its appeal on Usenet was never compression, since video is already compressed, but its ability to split output into fixed-size volumes and to carry recovery records. Files arrive as .rar plus numbered volumes and are rejoined by any archiver that understands the format, a step download clients normally perform automatically once repair has finished.
Browse all terms in Binaries, Encoding & Repair, or see the full Usenet glossary.