Free RAR Password Recovery

Among the many passwords that we have to remember, those we attach to files we don’t open frequently are the easiest to forget or lose.

Free RAR Password Recovery is a tool specialized in retrieving any lost or forgotten password assigned to a RAR archive. Using brute-force attacks and your own hints about how the password was built, this free utility is capable of decrypting any RAR file in time.

The program comes in a lame but functional tabbed interface that goes straight to the point. Actually, whenever you forget the password required to unblock a sensitive file, an unattractive interface is the least of your worries. Thus, you are asked to select the encrypted RAR archive and to provide as much information as you can remember about how it was created. The more details you can provide, the shorter the search will be.

You can tell the program the character set(s) used to create the password – Latin, Caps Latin, Digits, Other Symbols, and even a specific charset designed by you if that was the case. You can help the program by defining the number of characters you used to build the password, or at least a minimal length. If you happen to remember some of the first characters you used, the program can also use that information to start its attacks from a more advantageous position. Though masks and dictionaries appear also as other possible recovery types, these are reserved for those purchasing the Pro edition.

The app will then use all the information it could gather from you to perform a brute-force attack that will try every possible character and symbol combination until it finds the right password. Depending on the length and complexity of the forgotten password, this process may take minutes, hours, or even days until Free RAR Password Recovery displays the right password. Processing speed is not the app’s strongest asset – during my tests, the program barely managed to achieve a ratio of 20 passwords per second, while other similar tools managed to try – on the same machine – more than 1,000 passwords every second. It doesn’t provide you with a variant count or an estimate of the maximum possible time remaining, so it’s anyone’s guess when you’ll finally get your password back.

Free RAR Password Recovery, though limited in functionality, is a reliable password retriever. Recovering your lost or forgotten password may take longer than you expected, but the results are guaranteed.