How To Create Password Protected, Encrypted Or Split-archives Using Winrar

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Have you ever had a large file, let’s say a 500MB file that you wanted to upload to the Internet but the station you want to upload to only allows 100MB or something less than 500MB? Have you ever had a file that was a bit personal, lets say some emails or photos that you really don’t want just anyone viewing besides yourself? What about something really secretive, like blueprints or a book you objective wrote? Using a great application called, WinRAR, you can take care of all these problems and provide yourself with peace of mind and ease of uploading.

The three things you will learn in this tutorial are:

1) How to create a split archive.
2) How to create a password-protected archive.
3) How to create an encrypted password-protected archive.

So let’s get started. Say you are just dying to share that home video of your kid’s first steps with your parents who live pretty far away. You could mail the video, but that takes a long time and costs money, plus you need to go to the trouble of burning a DVD or burning the file to a CD-ROM. It makes a lot more sense to email them this, but what if the video is pretty long and it’s also a rather grand file? The better option is to send it using a service like MediaFire, so it does no take your parents 2 hours to receive their email on their half-rate Verizon DSL connection. MediaFire is a great service, but it has one lame limitation, it only allows a 100MB file to be sent. Most videos will exceed this size, so that what do you do? You create a split archive!

To do this, visit WinRAR’s homepage and download your free 30-day trial of their application. After the 30 days run out, you can buy the software for $29 or you can continue to use it with that annoying nag screen like the more familiar WinZip application has. There may be places online to buy the software at a cheaper price (or get it for free) but I am not aware, nor at the liberty to offer advice in this matter.

OK so you’ve installed WinRAR, well done. Now, pick up that file video file you want to send, right-click on it. You will notice some new options there for WinRAR, left-click the one that says “add to archive”, this will launch WinRAR, ready to compress your video file. The first thing you will notice is the archive name, you can leave this whatever the name is by default (which is the name of the video file) or change it, it does not matter. Now observe all the way to the bottom left, you see where it says “Split to volumes, bytes”? In that blank spot you want to type this: “100 mb”, without the quotes. What you are doing here is telling WinRAR how high a limit you want the file to be, but because your video file is more than 100 mb, it will automatically create a split-archive (multiple parts) of the video file. So let’s say this file is 500 MB, WinRAR will give you five 100MB parts in the filename format as follows: videofile.part1.rar, videofile.part2.rar, etc. There is no limit to how many parts you can create or what file size you can specify (in our case we specified 100MB). Once you’ve told WinRAR you want it at “100 mb” (remember, without the quotes) you can click the “OK” button at the bottom and WinRAR will make your parts for you. You can now upload these separate files, solving your file size dilemma.

It is important to imprint that the receiver of your files need to also have WinRAR installed and all of the parts in the same folder. I cannot emphasize this point enough, all of these parts must be in the same folder, which this is accomplish, the receiver will right-click part 1 of the file and choose “extract here”, which will give them the video file. Unlike ZIP, there is no need to extract part 2, because it was automatically done for you. The receiver can now delete the RAR part files and has the video.

Now, on a different note, let’s say you have something personal you want to send to someone, but ensure that they are the only person who sees it. For this example, lets say you just finished writing a book and you want to prove it to a trustworthy friend or colleague to read, your surely don’t want this getting into the wrong hands, after all it took a lot of time and energy to write! WinRAR has the perfect solution for you.

You will again, need to have WinRAR installed. Right-click the file you want to send and choose “add to archive”. Now you will see the same screen we used for split-archiving in the tutorial above, but you should also notice there are tabs at the top. Click on the “Advanced” tab. On the right you will peek a button that says, “Set password…”, click it. Now it will ask you to enter a password and re-enter it, to ensure you set it correctly. So for this example, we will enter the password 1234 (in reality make it something very hard). Now after you have entered the password there is an even better option for security, click the check box underneath that says “encrypt file names”, now click OK. You can now click the “General” tab at the top and then click the “OK” button on bottom. WinRAR will create your encrypted and password-protect file for you.

What we did here was ensured that no one on the earth can launch that RAR file without knowing the password, securing your book or whatever data you want, so only those you give the password to will be able to see it and with 128-bit AES encryption (same bit level online banks use) you can rest philosophize it will be for “their eyes only”.

It is indispensable to note that it is possible for a hacker to “crack” your password-protected, 128-bit encryption RAR file, by using a contrivance known as Brute-Forcing, but this is a process which uses a dictionary list (a massive list of common passwords and words) but can only guess what the password could be. So make sure your password is procure, something like, “happy”, is a abominable password and could easily be cracked. Instead of “ecstatic” try something like, “Happy44slappy92″, or better yet, “h4ppy2352s14ppy92″, the more difficult you make the password for someone to guess, the more difficult you design it for a Brute-Force attack as well. So happy uploading!