best way to compress files for mac and windows?

matt9b

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What is the safest corrupt-recoverable way to compress a large (16GB) set of files for use with mac and windows?

I have tried winrarring into parts, but winrar doesn't support par recovery, and unrarx for mac doesn't tell you which part is corrupt.

Is there a half decent .rar extraction utility for mac that can tell you which part is corrupt, and can read .rev (winrar recovery) files? It seems simple but I've tried so many.

If not, does anyone know of a solution here?
 
If it is a set of files I would be very tempted to just Zip it in chunks.

Wow. Where to start.. if you don't already know why this is a bad suggestion, then my explaining it won't make any difference, lets just say a clean 'no'.

So, that doesn't really answer my question.

Anyone else?
 
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That was.... not a massively friendly reply (and actually got less friendly after the edit). I also just read your replied to EDCC in your other thread, which was similarly poor in tone. It is very easy to take things the wrong way online so it tends to be a good idea to be actively friendly, especially when people are making an attempt to help. Otherwise people just don't bother answering your questions.

Also some more info on what kind of files you are referring to might help, given you say it is not just a plain set of files. You also say you have tried 'so many' other solutions- well without giving us some clue about what you have tried we are likely to suggest solutions you have already gone through, wasting time for everyone. I would suggest having a peak at the link in my signature which gives some tips for how to ask technical questions in the most effective way.

Also more info might help us suggest another form of solution you may not have considered. Compressing a 16gb directory is likely to be a pain in many cases, perhaps if the issue is dividing the directory into chunks that can transferred and then reassembled then there might be a non-rar alternative.

For instance could you use vmware fusion/parallels/virtual box to run Windows under Mac and therefor have access to the windows tools. You could even use say virtualbox and a linux distro like ubuntu and have a free (if awkward) was to access linux compression/division tools.

There are not a great deal of rar options for Mac in my experience, unrarx being the main player. The mac compression standard has always been stuffit, which does have a PC version and allows division into parts. How it deals with corruption I can't say as I abandoned it a while back- maybe another forum members has more recent experience there.

A few moments googling "OS X rar repair" did get me to http://www.bestsoftware4download.com/software/t-free-rar-for-mac-os-x-download-eecirezo.html

That points to winrar for OS X - is this the one which does not support 'par recovery'? From your post you seem to suggest that winrar does not read .rev files, hence my suspicion you meant the mac version lacked support for corruption-recovery.
 
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Another possibility- use traditional rar tools (winrar and unrarx) then perhaps you could md5 checksums to ensure the files are uncorrupted. Another workaround but is all I can think of for now and can be done on both Mac and PC.
 
What is the safest corrupt-recoverable way to compress a large (16GB) set of files for use with mac and windows?

I have tried winrarring into parts, but winrar doesn't support par recovery, and unrarx for mac doesn't tell you which part is corrupt.

Is there a half decent .rar extraction utility for mac that can tell you which part is corrupt, and can read .rev (winrar recovery) files? It seems simple but I've tried so many.

If not, does anyone know of a solution here?

Does the free The Unarchiver work for you Windows centric files? (you must check which files to unarchive in the programs preferences).
 
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