A nova versão do WinRAR 5.x introduziu o novo formato de arquivo RAR5 e esta é uma das muitas melhorias:
Save identical files as references If this option is enabled, WinRAR analyzes the file contents before starting archiving. If several identical files larger than 64 KB are found, the first file in the set is saved as usual file and all following files are saved as references to this first file. It allows to reduce the archive size, but applies some restrictions to resulting archive. You must not delete or rename the first identical file in archive after the archive was created, because it will make extraction of following files using it as a reference impossible. If you modify the first file, following files will also have the modified contents after extracting. Extraction command must involve the first file to create following files successfully.
It is recommended to use this option only if you compress a lot of identical files, will not modify an archive later and will extract an archive entirely, without necessity to unpack or skip individual files. If all identical files are small enough to fit into compression dictionary, solid archiving can provide more flexible solution than this option.
Supported for RAR 5.0 archives only.
Meu teste rápido na pasta que contém 320000 arquivos (Baldur's Gate Trilogy + Vários mods) tem esta aparência: link
Método de compactação RAR, compactação definida como "Store": 26,1 GB (28,053,815,768 bytes) Método de compressão RAR5, compressão definida para "Store": 23,9 GB (25,722,664,097 bytes)
Então, consegui economizar mais de 9% sem usar qualquer compactação!