Anyone who has flown into Gatwick airport at the end of their holiday, then stood on the platform waiting for the train home will know what it means. A prime example of what Britain does best.

Mediterranean memories carefully nurtured on the flight home, disappear with the first intake of the stale-piss air. Empty crisp packets blow along the platform like some garish man-made tumble weed. Heavy grey encrustations create grotesque stalactites from goodness knows what dripping out of the airport above. The descent into the realm of British railways is a post-apocalyptic nightmare compared with the high-tech world overhead.

Another thing Britain excels at is creating something pretty darned wonderful, then letting it wither away for lack of investment. The list is long enough already, Concorde, Blue Streak, TSR2, hovercraft, SimplyRAR. What? You’ve never heard of SimplyRAR?

Way back when

Back in the good old days, we needed to make compressed and segmented archives to fit onto the small-sized back-up disks of the day or to make sending them electronically more feasible. Large drives, broadband and file sizes, although large, have until recently been small enough to FTP. Inevitably, the files sizes have grown so that now a gigabyte for one item is nothing unusual.

It’s all very well putting this onto a DVD for snail mail delivery but sending over the Internet can be a hit and miss affair. After a few hours of uploading, the connection can close or slow to a trickle because someone in America decided to fill their spam collection. Segmenting has become necessary again although nowadays, files are often compressed in their native format – MP4’s for example.

Enter RAR, a proprietary format for data compression and archiving, devised by Eugene Roshal (hence RAR: Roshal ARchive). Roshal’s tools are command-line drive but many GUI front ends have been created and one, SimplyRAR is just about the best-looking and easiest to use on the Mac. Plus it is British, made by an Englishman in the Midlands.

The application is a single window and appears to be a project in the making because help files are still to be added. SimplyRAR’s creator, Peter Brian Clements, seems to have dropped-out although his Whois entry is still current. His blurb inside SimplyRAR states that he created some programs to use in his daily work and has released them into the wild for us all to use. But his website and email address are not active.

SimplyRAR works fine under Mac OS X 10.5 and is so simple that point and clicking will do the biz. Selecting the segment size is the only choice to make, plus one or two extras such as password protection, compression level and so on as shown in the image above.

When created, each segment can be transmitted without the danger of the connection timing out. Any missing or damaged segments can be transmitted at a later stage. Datalinks also run faster when dealing with a bunch of small files rather than one monster sized.

There is extra protection in the form of Par2. This can be used to recreate damaged files based on their binary pattern. They can be recreated even if one segment is missing simply by creating and sending a PAR file for the archive when it is made.

Finally, files can be decompressed and remade using the free Stuffit Expander or some of the many other de-archiving utilities.