Open a RAR file
Get the files out of a RAR without installing anything. Both RAR4 and RAR5 are supported, and nothing is stored.
- Never stored
- No queue, no waiting
- No signup, no watermark
How it works
Add your RAR
Drop it in. RAR4 and RAR5 are both read, including archives with folders inside them.
Look inside
Every file is listed with its size. A RAR is a solid stream rather than a catalogue, so it is read through once — which takes a moment on a large one.
Take what you want
Download one file or all of them together as a ZIP.
How a RAR is read
A ZIP keeps a catalogue and this page reads it; a RAR does not, and the difference costs memory rather than merely time. The archive is walked from the beginning in a single pass and every entry's contents are held as it goes, so a four-gigabyte RAR needs four gigabytes of the tab before it can even show you the list — where a ZIP of the same size lists instantly and decompresses only the file you click. That is why this is the page that gives up on a phone first, and it is a property of the format rather than a shortcut taken here.
Solid compression is part of the same story and is handled. A solid RAR squeezes its files as one continuous stream, which makes it smaller and means there is no cheap way to reach the middle: everything before a file has to be decompressed to get at it, which is exactly what one pass through the archive does anyway. What is genuinely not handled is a set split across volumes. A .part1.rar with its siblings sitting beside it is opened on its own, because only the file you dropped in is read, and the remaining data is in the parts that were not.
Several RAR features have no equivalent here because nothing is being restored onto a disk. Recovery records — the redundancy WinRAR can add so that a damaged archive can be repaired — are not used, so a corrupt RAR fails here and may still be entirely repairable in WinRAR itself. Unix permissions and file attributes are not read at all. What you take away is the bytes and the name, with the modification date carried through only when you download everything as a bundle.
When you want something else
This opens the file you drop in, once. A folder of RARs, a volume set, or anything on a schedule belongs on a command line: unar and lsar are free, list and extract without a licence, and are notably better than this page on old RAR4 archives whose names were written in a legacy code page — the case our own FAQ names as a known gap. 7-Zip does the same job on Windows, and WinRAR's command line does it if you already have WinRAR.
A damaged or half-downloaded RAR is the other one to take elsewhere. There is no repair here and no way to skip past a bad block — an error stops the extraction where it happened. WinRAR's own Repair uses the recovery record when the archive has one, and when it does not, downloading the file again is the only remedy anybody has.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need WinRAR?
No. Nothing is installed and nothing is bought. The reader is part of this page.
Is my RAR stored anywhere?
No. Nothing is stored and nothing is kept, and it keeps working with the Wi-Fi switched off once the page has loaded. That matters more for archives than for most files — a zip of your tax returns or a backup of a folder is exactly the kind of thing that should not be handed to a stranger's server.
Can you make a RAR as well?
No, and that one is not a limitation we can engineer around. The RAR compression format is proprietary, and the only source that can create one is licensed on terms that specifically forbid using it to build a competing archiver. There is no permissively-licensed RAR compressor in existence, so no browser tool can honestly offer one. If you need to send a compressed archive, ZIP opens everywhere without anything installed — that is what our Create ZIP page makes.
Which RAR versions work?
RAR4 and RAR5, which covers essentially everything made this century. The reader is libarchive, which implements the format independently rather than using RarLab's own code — that independence is what makes it usable under a permissive licence, and it is also why a few rare corners are not covered. A RAR4 carrying an archive comment, and non-English file names inside older RAR4 archives, are the known gaps. Nothing crashes: the page tells you what it could and could not read.
Can it open a password-protected RAR?
It will list what is inside and tell you the files are locked. Entering the password is not yet supported, so encrypted RAR contents cannot be extracted yet.
Is there a size limit?
Available memory, rather than a fixed size cap. Very large archives are opened a file at a time where the format allows it, so a big ZIP lists instantly and only the file you ask for is unpacked.
Is it safe to open a RAR from someone I do not know?
Archives are the one kind of file whose CONTENTS can be hostile, so two old attacks are handled before you see anything. A file inside an archive can be named "../../something" to try to escape the folder it is unpacked into — those names are clamped and you are told which ones were changed. And an archive can be a few kilobytes that unpacks to terabytes, which would take the browser tab down with it; that is measured and refused rather than attempted.
Good to know: Reading RAR is supported; writing it is not, and never will be — the compression algorithm is proprietary and its licence forbids third-party compressors. Encrypted and solid multi-part archives are not handled. Large archives are extracted in memory.
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