Have you ever downloaded a file from the internet and found that you can’t open it because of the strange .rar extension? That’s because your computer can’t open this file format by default.

RAR is a compressed file format that allows you to download and transfer large amounts of data from one computer to another. However, you need special software to access the data inside RAR archive files. Here is everything you need to know about opening or extracting RAR files on Windows or Mac.

A RAR file, short for Roshal Archive Compressed file, is a compressed file that can contain one or more other files or folders. It is an analog of your regular folder on your computer where you keep multiple files and data, only it does not take up as much storage space.

The only disadvantage of a RAR file is that before you can access the files inside it, you need to open the RAR file and extract its contents. For this, you need special software.