Archive to RAR Converter

Convert Archive to RAR Online

Have a ZIP, 7z, or tarball that has to be a .rar? Upload it here and the archive is unpacked on our servers, then its contents are repacked into a genuine RAR archive using RARLAB's own rar tool — not a renamed file with a .rar suffix. Nothing inside is re-encoded, so documents, photos, and binaries come back out exactly as they went in; only the outer wrapper and its compression change. RAR is the right target when the person or system on the other end specifically expects that extension. If you only need something the recipient can definitely open, Archive to ZIP is the safer choice, and Archive to 7z usually squeezes harder.

How to Convert Archive to RAR

1. Upload Your Archive: Drag and drop the file onto the page or click "+ Add Files." Accepted inputs are ZIP, 7z, RAR, TAR, TAR.GZ, TGZ, TAR.BZ2, TB2, TZ2, and TAR.XZ.
2. Check the "Combine?" Setting: Archive-to-archive jobs run as Individual Archives, so each file you upload comes back as its own .rar. Bundling many separate loose files into one archive is a different job, handled by the File to RAR tool.
3. Queue the Rest of Your Batch (Optional): Add as many archives as you like in one pass. They are unpacked and repacked independently, so a mixed batch of ZIP, 7z, and .tar.gz inputs all come back as separate RAR files.
4. Convert and Download: Click "Convert" and save the result. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark.

RAR vs ZIP vs 7z — What the Repack Changes

Already-compressed payloads — JPEG photos, MP3s, MP4s, or a folder of PNGs — barely shrink in any of the three, because the bytes are already close to incompressible. The size differences above only show up on text, source code, logs, CSVs, and uncompressed binaries.

What the RAR Output Includes — and What It Doesn't

Our pipeline invokes the rar tool with its default settings and passes no extra switches, so a few RAR features that WinRAR users know are deliberately absent from the file you download.

If you need any of those, download the RAR here and then add encryption, a recovery record, or volumes locally in WinRAR — those are packaging switches, and applying them later does not touch the files inside.

When RAR Is Worth Targeting

• A tool, game mod loader, or upload form validates the extension and rejects anything that is not .rar.
• You are matching an existing archive set so the whole batch has one consistent format.
• You want a container whose format supports recovery records and volume splitting, and you plan to add those in WinRAR afterwards.
• Everyone in the loop already has WinRAR, 7-Zip, or a current Windows 11 build, so extraction is not a problem.

If none of those apply, ZIP and 7z are both free to create as well as to extract, which is why they are the default choice almost everywhere else.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does converting an archive to RAR change the files inside?

No. The conversion is a container swap: your archive is unpacked to a working folder, and those exact files are packed into a new RAR. Text, images, video, and executables come out identical to the originals — an archive format only wraps and compresses bytes, it never re-encodes them the way a video or image converter does.

Why can't I just create a RAR with 7-Zip or Windows?

Because RAR compression is proprietary. RARLAB's licence permits any software to unpack RAR archives but not to create them, so 7-Zip, PeaZip, and The Unarchiver can all open a .rar while offering only ZIP and 7z as output. Windows 11 File Explorer is in the same position: it gained native extraction for RAR, 7z, and TAR through the libarchive project, but it still only creates ZIP.

Will the RAR come out smaller than my ZIP or 7z?

Sometimes, and it depends entirely on what is inside. RAR5 generally beats ZIP's DEFLATE on text, source code, logs, and other repetitive data, while 7z's LZMA2 is often tighter still. Against a payload of JPEGs, MP3s, or MP4s all three land within a rounding error of each other, because that data is already compressed. Do not expect a meaningful size win from the container alone.

Can I convert a password-protected archive, and is the output encrypted?

Neither. There is no password field on this page, so an encrypted source archive cannot be unpacked and the job will fail — decrypt it locally first, then upload. The RAR you get back is likewise unencrypted, since our pipeline runs rar with defaults and adds no password.

Is the output RAR4 or RAR5, and does it matter?

Current rar builds write the RAR5 format by default, which is what this converter produces. It matters only for genuinely old software: RAR5 arrived with WinRAR 5.0 in 2013, so anything predating that — including WinRAR 4.x and some ancient bundled unpackers — will refuse the file. Every current archive tool reads RAR5 without complaint.

What happens if I upload several archives at once?

You get one .rar per input file. Archive-to-archive conversion runs in Individual Archives mode, so a ZIP, a 7z, and a .tar.gz uploaded together come back as three separate RAR files with their contents kept apart. To merge loose files into a single archive instead, use the File to RAR tool, which is built for that job.

Do Unix file permissions and ownership survive the repack?

No, and that is deliberate. The RAR is built from the files as they exist on the conversion server after unpacking, not from the mode bits recorded in your source archive — and unpacking is done defensively, with tarball inputs extracted using --no-same-owner and --no-same-permissions so an uploaded archive cannot set ownership or privileged mode bits on our machines. The new RAR therefore records the conversion account's ownership and default permissions. If you need an executable bit or exact mode preserved — a shell script inside a release bundle, for example — repack locally instead.

What opens the .rar file I get back?

WinRAR, 7-Zip, PeaZip, and The Unarchiver on macOS all open it, as does Windows 11 File Explorer on builds with native RAR support. On a Mac or Linux box the unar and unrar command-line tools handle it too. If you would rather pull the contents straight back out without installing anything, Extract RAR unpacks the archive online and returns the files.

How are my uploads handled?

Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, unpacked and repacked on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours. There is no sign-up, no watermark, and your archives are never shared or made public. The practical limit on a big job is upload size and connection speed, since the archive has to reach the server before any work starts.