What to do if I forgot my pwd. on Win RAR

Happy Hopping

Happy Hopping

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jul 1, 2004
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I have an old set of files that I compressed back on Dec. 31, 2006. Now I need to open that RAR file, and there is a password that I enter back 1 yr ago. I try the most popular pwd. that I would have use, but nothing match.

Is there a way out of this problem?
 
You're pretty much out of luck. There are some commercial password crackers that may be able to help, but it's a toss-up. I've had clients waste good money on such software in the past only to lose the data in the long run. Not once have I ever seen such software successfully "crack" a password protected archive.

YMMV, however, who knows...
 
It's possible to extract the password out of zip and word documents. That's not the case with RAR files--unless the OP used an easy-to-bruteforce password, there's virtually no chance that the password will be cracked this century (unless, of course, an algorithm arises that can get the password from the archive, but that's unlikely).
 
If the password was reasonably short (like 6 characters) a brute force attack would be more successful if you know that it only contained alphanumeric characters without special symbols like ! @ # $ %.

Even if you only used alphanumerics (A-Z, a-z, 0-9, _) short passwords would still require many tries. A 6-character password would have 62523502209 possible combinations.

If you had a 10 character password using alphanumeric characters only, ~985 trillion different passwords.
 
I use simple password, it would be a simple word, but I recall I was helping someone a few yr. ago, and he lost a pwd. on a XLS spreadsheet, and I download a simple brute force password software, and within minutes, I got thru. So I figure, I can do the same thing if there is a brute force for win rar. I'll try that above link and see what happens
 
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