7zip vs. WinRAR what is better ???

7zip for me too. It is allegedly more secure, harder to crack. There are free Winrar password crackers which claim to work in minutes.

dsperber said:

One additional comment... I've recently had need to investigate and then extract from the installation files on a Win7 install DVD.

Specifically, these are compacted inside of INSTALL.WIM on the DVD.

And WIM files are NOT supported by the named alternatives, to the best of my knowledge.

7zip opens WIM files from the Win7 DVD just fine... o.o

7 Zip. First and mainly reason because its free,and I think that it have higher compression than WinRar.

I use both, winrar for archiving , and 7zip to open files winrar cant..

Britton30 said:

7zip for me too. It is allegedly more secure, harder to crack. There are free Winrar password crackers which claim to work in minutes.

Its actually up to the user of winrar or 7zip to create a strong password, and to choose settings like encrypt/hide file names ect, The so called Cracking software your talking about uses a dictionary/bruiteforce attack therefore they are only able to crack insecure passwords, so no their is no easy backdoor or any other easy known cracking method in winrar as long as you use a secure password and the right settings so others cant view filenames.

Here is an example of a secure 233 bit password generated by a free software called Passworg.
/!yA, sl%.D6JL+]ZI=bhBtQ)VPi:x

But in the long run if your trying to encrypt single files or packed archives, and your worried about backdoors or someone cracking your files something like AxCrypt is way more secure than winrar or 7zip by a long run, check out the Features page for more info and all the features winrar and 7zip lack.

Another issue to be concerned about is the file itsself before you archived it has probably been copied to other places on your hd in one way or another, be it cache, file index (Search Feature Catalogs), thumbs.db, last file access ect.