To activate this dialog select "Settings…" command in Options menu and click on "Compression" tab. The dialog contents are described below. Note that most of compression options can be specified via the Compression profiles/Create default button.
More details about different compression parameters can be found in How to choose optimal archiving settings topic.
Compression profiles/Create default
In the dialog displayed after pressing this button you may specify default values for most compression options. Online help is available for all sections of the dialog, simply press "Help" button at any time to read detailed options description.
Options entered in this dialog are stored in the default compression profile, which name is "Default Profile", and are automatically restored before every archiving operation.
Some parameters of default compression profile are used not only when adding files to archive, but in other archive modification operations like deleting or renaming files. In this case WinRAR reads only those parameters, which are suitable for current operation. Extraction does not use any options from the default compression profile.
Compression profiles/Organize
Opens the dialog to organize compression profiles. In this Organize profiles dialog you may delete existing profiles or edit their parameters. For example, you may rename a profile or set it as default. Read online help associated with this dialog for more information.
Volume size list/Define volume sizes…
This button activates Define volume sizes dialog. Here you can customize the list of predefined volume sizes associated with "Split to volumes, size" field in Archive name and parameters dialog.
Default folder for archives
If this field is not empty and an archive name does not contain a full path, an archive will be created in the specified folder. For example, if you entered the path to your Desktop, archives created by WinRAR will appear on the Desktop.
If this field is empty and an archive name does not contain a full path, archives will be created in the same folder as the files archived.
In the command line mode -cfg- switch disables most of WinRAR settings including the default folder for archives.
Default folder for extracted files
You may enter here a name of the folder, which will be used as a base to construct the destination folder in Extract without confirmation and Extract files to the specified folder commands. WinRAR builds the destination path in these extraction commands merging the default folder and an archive name. It may be convenient to enter Desktop path here, so you will immediately see unpacked data on your Desktop.
Unlike the default folder for archives, the default folder for extracted files is not used in the command line mode and in context menus.
Append archive name to path
It controls if archive name is appended to the default folder name when constructing the destination path.
Remove redundant folders from extraction path
This option works only in context menus, only for single selected archive with single folder and no files in archive root folder and only for "Extract to DestName\" command, where 'DestName' is a name of folder proposed by WinRAR and based on archive name. If all these conditions are met, this option removes the top level folder based on archive name from extraction path.
For example, if you have Pictures.rar containing all files in 'Samples' folder and if you unpack it with "Extract to Pictures\" context menu command, WinRAR will place files to "Pictures\Samples" if this option is off and to "Samples" if it is on. So it helps to save one click, avoiding necessity to open 'Pictures' folder, which contains nothing but 'Samples'.
This option introduces an additional delay in the beginning of extraction, because WinRAR needs to scan an archive and analyze its folder structure. Note that context menu still displays the archive based folder name even if it will be removed from path when extracting. Showing the correct folder already in context menu would introduce a potentially annoying delay between right clicking an archive and displaying the context menu.