I recently ran into a little problem with some Harddrives and had to restore a drive from a backup. Problem with that is there are a lot of files in my backup that were either downloaded from the web, or archived myself with WinRAR. I was going through using WinRAR to extract all of these archives and decided to look to see if there was something that would make the process easier.

I ran across a little program called Autounpack. This little utility seems to be great for what I wanted to do, but also excellent for people that do a lot of web downloading (bittorrenting etc).

Autounpack will extract all files in a given folder to another folder that you specify. So I set it up to check the backup HDD and extract any RAR’d files to the new HDD. But forget about that for a moment. Lets talk about the best use of Autounpack.

Lets say you use Bittorrent, Rapidshare, or any of the other various places that have files available for download. Many times, those files will be in RAR format, so you would have to download the file then go to the file and extract it.

A good way to use Autounpack

All you have to do is create a default download folder on your PC. launch AutoUnpack and set the folder you created as the source folder. The destination folder can be the same folder, or you can create different folder. Press start in Autounpack and it will continuously monitor that folder for compressed files. Now whenever you download a file to that folder that is in RAR or ZIP format, Autounpack will see it, wait till the download is finished, then extract it to your destination folder.

Autounpack has a few options to help keep things tidy, such as the option to delete the RAR files once unpacked. You can set that up to do it immediately or after a certain time has passed. You also have options to keep files in its folder structure and to transfer over non compressed files along with the file that is compressed, such as a “README” text file.

Autounpack is free and you can visit the product website to download or for more information.