What is a .par file?

If you've ever dabbled in a spot of spanned archive downloading you'll know that getting them to work isn't always plain sailing. Several bytes are often lost on the long journey from remote servers to your computer, and even more infuriating, sometimes the uploaded files are corrupt to begin with. Par files are designed to combat these problems as they are capable of rebuilding partially intact archives.

For instance, if you have downloaded twenty rar files, yet one of them is corrupt, rather than downloading that file again, providing you have the accompanying par file, you can rebuild the missing file to complete the set. Making use of such a technique is obviously subject to your ability to get hold of your archive's accompanying par file. If there isn't one available you will have to re-download the rogue files as you would normally.

The 'par donor' doesn't necessarily have to be the person who created the archive originally since anyone with the complete set can construct an accompanying par file and then pass it on to anyone who is having problems extracting the set. For more information refer to the Quick Par home page.