Bandizip RAR: Open RAR and RAR5 Files for Free

Bandizip extracting a multi-volume RAR5 archive with the progress dialog visible

RAR is the format with the most confusing licensing story in consumer software, and Bandizip sits right in the middle of it. It opens RAR and RAR5 archives for free, on any edition, without a plugin. It cannot create them. Both halves of that sentence are deliberate.

Why extraction is free and creation is not

RAR's compression algorithm is proprietary to RARLAB. The decompression side is published as source that anyone may implement — that is how 7-Zip, Bandizip, PeaZip and every other archiver can read RAR. Compression is not published, so writing a .rar file requires either a licence from RARLAB or clean-room reverse engineering, which nobody has shipped commercially.

The practical result: you can receive a RAR from anyone and open it with Bandizip, forever, for nothing. If you need to send RAR, you need WinRAR, and that is a 29 USD decision independent of which archiver you prefer for everything else.

Multi-volume sets

Old Usenet and scene releases split archives into .rar, .r00, .r01 or the newer .part1.rar, .part2.rar convention. Bandizip handles both. Open the first volume and it walks the set automatically, provided every part sits in the same folder with the original names intact.

Two failure modes worth knowing: renaming a part breaks the chain, and a missing middle volume stops extraction with a CRC error rather than a clear "part 7 is missing" message. If a set fails, sort the folder by name and confirm the numbering is continuous before assuming corruption.

Password-protected RAR files

Bandizip prompts for the password and handles RAR's AES encryption, including archives with encrypted filenames — where even the file list is unreadable until the password is entered. There is no recovery path inside the free edition; Professional adds the brute-force recovery tool, and even then it is limited by how good the password is rather than by the tool.

A detail that trips people up: RAR5 and ZIP use different encryption wrappers, and a password that works in one tool may be rejected by another if the archive used header encryption. Always test with the tool that created the file before concluding the password is wrong.

Converting RAR to ZIP

There is no "save as ZIP" button, and you do not need one. Extract the archive, then re-compress the folder as ZIP. If the goal is to avoid installing anything, that is the whole workflow.

If the goal is long-term storage, ZIP is a reasonable target and 7Z is a better one: both are open, both open everywhere, and 7Z usually produces a smaller file than RAR for the same content.

When a RAR will not open at all

Check the signature. A .rar that is actually an HTML error page from a download manager is the most common cause. Open it in a text editor; if the first bytes are not Rar!, the download failed.
Try the last volume first. Some sets are opened from the final part, not the first.
Test integrity. Bandizip's Test command (F5) reports which volume failed, which is faster than guessing.
Repair. Professional's Repair Archive can salvage a truncated ZIP; for RAR, RARLAB's own repair tool is the better option because the format is theirs.

The workflow most people settle on

Use Bandizip as the default handler for everything, including RAR, because double-clicking should just work. Keep WinRAR installed only if you produce RAR files for other people. Skip the "RAR to ZIP converter" sites entirely — they upload your files to a stranger's server, and the conversion takes longer than doing it locally.

For the reverse direction, see our notes on installing the current build and on smart extraction, which is what makes opening a hundred of these bearable.