WinRK is a new high performance file archiver. Built from the ground up for better compression and security,
it provides the best platform for managing and creating file archives.
WinRK supports all the most common archive formats in use today, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, RAR and ISO.
WinRK’s ZIP support is fully compatible with both the Zip64 standard and the new WinZIP AES encryption
standard. This means that ZIP files created with WinRK can take advantage of file and archive sizes of
over 4GB, along with strong encryption capabilities. The ZIP deflate and deflate64 algorithms have been
improved as well, providing 10-20% smaller archives in most cases, without loosing any compatibility!
WinRK also provides a new high performance RK archive format. This format was designed from the outset
to remove many of the limitations of older archive formats, and so provides much better compression and
security than other formats. It supports a virtually unlimited archive size, which makes it ideal for
very large backups. It also provides compression options ranging from fast and efficient, all the way
to a ‘spare no cost’ approach which provides the very best compression ratios in the world.
One of the most interesting innovations that WinRK brings to archiving is a unique modern user interface
design. WinRK provides access to archives using a modify then apply paradigm, allowing many changes to be
made to an archive in one single batch. This can be especially important for very large archives as it
means that many normally prohibitively expensive individual changes can be made to to the archive in one
single action. WinRK also places no arbitrary restrictions on modifying existing archives, unlike many
existing popular archivers. This allows files to be added to, removed from, renamed or moved within an
existing archive.
A new addition to WinRK is support for a Plugin API. This allows developers to extend WinRK by writing
plugins to support different archive formats. Support is also provided for new compression algorithms
to be plugged directly into the native WinRK format, allowing codec developers to leverage the full
potential of the WinRK format with very little extra work.