The advantage of using the encryption built into the RAR format is that you can distribute an encrypted RAR archive to anyone with WinRAR, 7zip or other common software that supports the RAR format. For your use case, this is irrelevant. Therefore I recommend using a software that is dedicated to encryption.

The de facto standard since you're using Windows was TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt provides a virtual disk which is stored as an encrypted file. Not only is this more secure than WinRAR (I trust TrueCrypt, which is written with security in mind from day 1, far more than any product whose encryption is an ancillary feature), it is also more convenient: you mount the encrypted disk by providing your password, then you can open files on the disk transparently, and when you've finished you unmount the encrypted disk. Sadly TrueCrypt is no longer in active development but it's successor VeraCrypt is. VeraCrypt is based on TrueCrypt and is compatible with the old TrueCrypt containers.

Lynda