To use Quickpar you simply add one or more files that you want to split into parts, select a file size for those parts and the amount of Recovery blocks that can be used to recover the archive if files do get corrupted.This is excellent if you want to backup important files, videos or pictures on CD or DVD.

We all know that sometimes those CDs and DVDs become partly unreadable and the created pars can be used to recover the complete archive even though part of it could not be read.

It is possible to alter several other settings before splitting the big file and creating the pars but that is normally not necessary. You could raise the block size for instance. The user could also keep the original file and create pars for it to be able to recover it if put on CD or DVD or transferred over the Internet.

Files can be recovered by clicking on any par file that is created in the process. Quickpar will automatically load the archive and check all files within to see if any are corrupted. If they are it tries to repair those corrupt blocks automatically if enough par blocks exist.

A software that is able to protect your important files against corruption is called ICE ECC which creates so called recovery files that can be used to recover files that are corrupted or partially damaged. They can’t recover files that are not there anymore of course but most of the time you have partial files that can be recovered. This is a like the Par2 file system which I have written about earlier in this week.

ICE ECC offers some advantages over Par2 files. First it is possible to create recovery files for directories with no limitation on file size, amount of files and names. The recovery files themselves are compressed to make it easier to store them on your system. Last but not least some tests that have been published on the developers website claim that ICE ECC is a lot faster than Quickpar for instance. I do not think that this is such an important factor after all unless you create recovery files every day.

Let us further assume that some of the rar files have been uploaded incompletely to the Usenet which happens from time to time. It would not be possible to extract test.avi because of the broken files in the archive. Par2 Files are fixers. They analyze the blocks of each rar archive and post back if it is complete, incomplete or missing. Every Par2 file can be used to fix a certain number of blocks that corresponds to the amount of blocks of the rar files.

All you need to have is enough par2 files that can fix the missing blocks in the rar files to repair these files. The real beauty of this system is that you can fix any broken rar file with any par2 file. You do not need to look for the complete rar file, all you need is to download the par2 files which are normally posted with the rar files in the same newsgroup.

I’m using the free software Quickpar to test and repair rar archives that I have downloaded from the Usenet.

The first screenshot shows tested files using Quickpar. It shows that 96 blocks are missing and are needed to repair the archive so that it can be extracted. After downloading enough Par2 files to be able to repair the archive Quickpar automatically repairs the damaged files.

The second screenshot displays three par2 files that can be used to repair the damaged files. This process usually does not take more than a few minutes and you can extract the archive when the operation has been finished.