Convert RAR to ZIP

This is the most common archive problem there is. RAR is popular with people who compress a lot and invisible to everyone else, because no operating system ships anything that reads it. Windows shows a blank icon, macOS offers to search the App Store, and a managed work laptop will not let you install WinRAR to find out what a colleague sent you.

ZIP is the opposite in every respect: published as APPNOTE.TXT since 1989, supported natively on both major desktops, and accepted by essentially every upload form, shared drive and ticketing system in existence. Converting is not an upgrade — RAR is technically the stronger archive and compresses better — it is a translation into the format your machine already speaks. The conversion is worth doing precisely because the constraint is not the file, it is the environment you have to open it in, and that is the part you cannot change.

The tool that unpacks it is `unrar-free`, which is GPL-2+ and part of Debian's main archive, invoked as a separate process on our converter. That was not the expected answer. The obvious route is RARLAB's own `unrar` from Debian's non-free component, and it would have been the first non-free piece in a stack that is otherwise BSD, MIT and Apache.

It was also not needed. The received wisdom that the free implementation is stuck at RAR4 turned out to be out of date, so the non-free dependency would have been taken on for nothing at all. The 7-Zip build used for every other archive format here does not help either: Debian compiles it without the RAR codec, which is why RAR travels a different path through the converter than anything else on this site. None of that changes what you get back, but it is the reason this pair exists at all — and the reason the site can offer it without a proprietary component sitting in the middle of an otherwise permissively licensed stack.

RAR5 is the format everything has written since 2013, and support for it here was verified against a real archive with nested directories and compressed content rather than taken on trust. If your file came from any recent version of WinRAR, that is the case this conversion was tested for.

RAR4 is untested and this page would rather say so than imply a coverage we have not checked. The trial packer available for building test fixtures only writes RAR5, so there was no way to produce a RAR4 file to try. The tool's original purpose was exactly that format, so it very probably works — but "very probably" is the truthful word, and a failure surfaces as the ordinary conversion error rather than as anything dramatic.

Conversions on this site run in both directions wherever they can, and this one does not. The UnRAR licence allows the code to be used for extracting archives and specifically forbids using it to build a program that creates them, so producing a RAR is the one thing our converter may not do.

It is enforced rather than remembered. The format is marked as unwritable in our registry, the converter's own list of formats it may write does not contain it, and a test fails if those two ever disagree. That is why you will find `rar` as a source on this site and never as a target, and why the answer to "convert my ZIP to RAR" is a flat no rather than a maybe.

RAR is a solid format: it compresses the members as one continuous stream, so material repeated across files is stored once. ZIP compresses every entry independently against a 32 KB window and writes a directory at the end listing them all.

The result is that the same content usually needs more room as a ZIP, and the gap widens with the number of similar files. A RAR holding two hundred documents from one template will grow noticeably; a RAR holding a single film will barely move, because video was compressed long before it was archived. If the size matters more than the compatibility, converting to 7Z keeps solid compression in an open format.

RAR supports encryption and an encrypted archive cannot be unpacked without its password, so the job stops with a message. The extractor is deliberately run in a way that fails rather than waits — there is no terminal on the converter for a password prompt to appear in, and a job that hangs until it is killed is a worse experience than one that says no immediately.

If you have the password, extract the archive on a machine where you can, then compress the folder to ZIP from the file manager. If you do not have it, nothing on this page or anywhere else will help, and any site that claims otherwise is selling something.

RAR made multi-volume archives normal — `part1.rar`, `part2.rar` and so on, or the older `.r00` sequence — because it was designed when files moved on floppies and modems. Extracting one needs every volume available at once.

This converter receives a single uploaded file, so a set cannot be reassembled here even if you upload the first part: the extractor finds the archive incomplete and the job fails. The way through is to put the volumes back together with a local archiver, or to ask whoever sent it for one whole file. It is a real limitation of the arrangement rather than a bug, and it is better stated up front than discovered after four uploads.

RAR carries some things ZIP has never had. A recovery record — optional redundancy stored inside the archive that can repair a damaged file — has no counterpart in the ZIP specification, so it does not survive the conversion. Neither does RAR's own encryption, since an encrypted archive cannot be converted in the first place.

The general rule for archive conversions here is the useful one to remember: the members come out byte for byte, and what is at risk is whatever the container knew about them rather than what was inside them. Passwords and, on some formats, permissions and timestamps are the usual casualties. Your actual files are not.

Most tools on this site never send your file anywhere, and this is one of the exceptions, because unpacking a RAR needs a real program rather than something that can run inside a browser tab. The file is uploaded over an encrypted connection, extracted, repacked as a ZIP and returned. Everything the job touched — the upload, the extracted files and the output — is deleted when it finishes, and nobody reads any of it.

The working space is memory-backed and bounded, the container that ran the job is thrown away afterwards, and any job still running at sixty seconds is killed. The free tier accepts 25 MB per file, and an archive that declares it expands to more than 2 GB is refused before a single byte is written to disk — the standard defence against a file built to fill a disk rather than to hold data. If the archive is genuinely confidential, 7-Zip and Keka both read RAR on your own machine and never send it anywhere.

On Windows, double-clicking the ZIP shows the contents as though it were a folder, and that view is genuinely a preview rather than an extraction — files dragged out of it are copied, files edited inside it often are not saved back where you expect. The reliable move is Extract All to a real folder before you work on anything, which is the same advice that has been true of Windows ZIP handling for twenty years.

On macOS, double-clicking extracts the whole archive next to it immediately, with no preview step at all. Either way, the point of the conversion has been reached at that moment: the contents are ordinary files in an ordinary folder, and the RAR that started the problem can be deleted or filed away. Nothing further needs installing, which for most people arriving at this page is the entire objective.