RAR format started out as a compression utility like Winzip and became the standard on the newsgroups because of it's ability to split up the archive that it makes. Like any great story, RAR's consist of 3 sections: a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Here are 2 examples of the way that RAR files are numbered:

Beginning - From WinRAR 3.0 on, the first file of the archive has an extension of .part1.rar. Prior to version 3.0 it would be .rar. This is the file you open to extract the entire archive.

Middle - These are all the files that lie between the Beginning and the End. They should all have exactly the same size as the Beginning file. Due to the nature of the newer YENC encoding, these files may appear to have slightly different sizes when displayed in the news reader. This is normal, just make sure that once they are decoded on your hard drive they all have exactly the same size.

End - This is the last file of the archive and is distinguishable by the shorter file size than the rest of the parts. As WinRAR adds data to the archive it chops off the file into equal pieces, the last piece will only contain whatever is left of the archive at the end.

WinRAR has become the standard archiving tool used on the newsgroups. With the ever increasing size of media files, rar files are popping up in newsgroups that once housed small media files. Newsgroups that once had albums chopped up into mp3's are now full of RAR archives of high quality ISOs of albums. Getting the latest copy and understanding what a complete archive set consists of is crucial.

Check out our guide to WinRAR - Slyck's Guide To WinRAR

So what do you do if you have downloaded an archive with 47 parts and 2 of them are missing? Read the next two sections to find out what to do about missing files.