At some point we may find ourselves needing to compress a file into several parts to send it by email or save it on several USB sticks. This operation is simple using the program WinRAR.
In fact, this is a useful trick even if the files do not allow further compression. We will simply use WinRAR to divide it into smaller parts, choosing a size limit that is easier for us to handle.
Since WinRAR is a free, lightweight program that integrates well into the operating system, we avoid looking for another specific tool to cut large files and, incidentally, we can compress them to a certain extent. Let's see the steps to do it:
- Choose a file and right-click on it, clicking on " Add file":
- On the screen that appears, we have to pay attention to the bottom left, where the option " Partir in volumes of… is found. ":
- It will let us choose the size in which we are going to divide the file or choose a predefined one. In this case, we are going to divide it into 500 MB parts:
- We also get other options, including the compression format (RAR, ZIP or others), the algorithm used or the possibility of add a password It is not necessary to change these settings if we do not want to, just click on "OK" to start the process:
- We will obtain several files whose name ends in partXX.rar where XX is the number corresponding to each fragment:
- Now we can save files on CDs, DVDs or USB drives, send them by email or give them any other use where there is a size limit per file.
- When unpacking them, it is important that all the parts are in the same locationfor WinRAR to extract them.
WinRAR is an almost standard program, but we must remember that Windows does not open RAR files by default, while it does decompress the ZIP, even though the built-in tool is very basic.
Usually several files are compressed to save them as one and share them, but following this tutorial we can use WinRAR with the opposite objective, which will make it easier for us to work with very large.
What do you think of this trick? Is it a good idea to opt for WinRAR to split an archive into several smaller parts?
