Wednesday, 5 August 2009

Howto Create Split RAR Files

Lets learn how to create split Rar files

If you have a large amount of data to backup or especially to transfer it can be very prudent to use an archive that can be split into smaller parts, if one section becomes corrupted during transfer, it is far better to transfer a single 15mb file again, than an entire 10GB file, right?

Lets grab the rar program:

sudo apt-get install rar

Ok lets compress our directory of files:

To compress file(s) to split rar archive know which directory you want to compress, I'll use a fictional DVD Image folder in the home folder.

rar a -m5 -v5M -R myarchive /home/yourname/dvdimage

Let me break the above command down

rar – starts the program
a – tells program to add files to the archive
-m5 – determine the compression level (0-store (fast)…3-default…5-maximum(slow))
-v15M – determine the size of each file in split archive, in this example you get files with size 15MB (if you wanted files of 512kB size you would write -v512k)
myarchive – name of the archive you are creating
/home/yourname/dvdimage – is folder of the files you wish to add to the archive

You can also add -p to the command after a and it will prompt you for a password.

You can read the manual for more options with man rar (Press q to exit and arrows to scroll up/down)

To uncompress the archive type:

rar x myarchive.part01.rar

Or right click on file myarchive.part01.rar in Nautilus and choose Extract Here.




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