dar (disk archive) is a

computer program A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to execute. Computer programs are one component of software, which also includes documentation and other intangible components. A computer program ...

, a command-line archiving tool intended as a replacement for

tar Tar is a dark brown or black viscous liquid of hydrocarbons and free carbon, obtained from a wide variety of organic materials through destructive distillation. Tar can be produced from coal, wood, petroleum, or peat. "a dark brown or black bi ...

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

Features

* Support for slices, archives split over multiple files of a particular size * Option of deleting files from the system which are removed in the archive * Full backup *

Differential backup A differential backup is a type of data backup that preserves data, saving only the difference in the data since the last full backup. The rationale in this is that, since changes to data are generally few compared to the entire amount of data in t ...

* Incremental backup, * Decremental backup * Takes care of any type of inode (directory, plain files, symlinks, special devices,

named pipe In computing, a named pipe (also known as a FIFO for its behavior) is an extension to the traditional pipe concept on Unix and Unix-like systems, and is one of the methods of inter-process communication (IPC). The concept is also found in OS/2 and ...

s, sockets,

doors A door is a hinged or otherwise movable barrier that allows ingress (entry) into and egress (exit) from an enclosure. The created opening in the wall is a ''doorway'' or ''portal''. A door's essential and primary purpose is to provide security by ...

, ...) * Takes care of

hard-linked In computing, a hard link is a directory entry (in a directory-based file system) that associates a name with a file. Thus, each file must have at least one hard link. Creating additional hard links for a file makes the contents of that file ...

inodes (hard-linked plain files, char devices,

block device In Unix-like operating systems, a device file or special file is an interface to a device driver that appears in a file system as if it were an ordinary file. There are also special files in DOS, OS/2, and Windows. These special files allow a ...

s, hard-linked symlinks) * Takes care of

sparse file In computer science, a sparse file is a type of computer file that attempts to use file system space more efficiently when the file itself is partially empty. This is achieved by writing brief information (metadata) ''representing'' the empty block ...

s * Takes care of Linux file

Extended Attributes Extended file attributes are file system features that enable users to associate computer files with metadata not interpreted by the filesystem, whereas regular attributes have a purpose strictly defined by the filesystem (such as permissions or ...

, * Takes care of Linux file ACL * Takes care of Mac OS X file forks * Takes care of some filesystem specific attributes like Birthdate of HFS+ filesystem and immutable, data-journaling, secure-deletion, no-tail-merging, undeletable, noatime attributes of ext2/3/4 filesystem. * Per-file compression with

gzip gzip is a file format and a software application used for file compression and decompression. The program was created by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler as a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, and i ...

, bzip2, lzo, xz or lzma (as opposed to compressing the whole archive). An individual can choose not to compress already compressed files based on their filename suffix. * Fast-extracting of files from anywhere in the archive * Fast listing of archive contents through saving the catalogue of files in the archive * Optional

Blowfish Tetraodontidae is a family of primarily marine and estuarine fish of the order Tetraodontiformes. The family includes many familiar species variously called pufferfish, puffers, balloonfish, blowfish, blowies, bubblefish, globefish, swellfis ...

Twofish In cryptography, Twofish is a symmetric key block cipher with a block size of 128 bits and key sizes up to 256 bits. It was one of the five finalists of the Advanced Encryption Standard contest, but it was not selected for standardization. T ...

, AES,

Serpent Serpent or The Serpent may refer to: * Snake, a carnivorous reptile of the suborder Serpentes Mythology and religion * Sea serpent, a monstrous ocean creature * Serpent (symbolism), the snake in religious rites and mythological contexts * Serp ...

Camellia ''Camellia'' (pronounced or ) is a genus of flowering plants in the family Theaceae. They are found in eastern and southern Asia, from the Himalayas east to Japan and Indonesia. There are more than 220 described species, with some controv ...

encryption * Optional public key encryption and signature (

OpenPGP Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is an encryption program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is used for signing, encrypting, and decrypting texts, e-mails, files, directories, and whole disk partiti ...

) * Live filesystem backup: detects when a file has been modified while it was read for backup and can retry saving it up to a given maximum number of retries * Hash file ( MD5,

SHA1 In cryptography, SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) is a cryptographically broken but still widely used hash function which takes an input and produces a 160-bit (20-byte) hash value known as a message digest – typically rendered as 40 hexadecim ...

SHA-512 SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2) is a set of cryptographic hash functions designed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and first published in 2001. They are built using the Merkle–Damgård construction, from a one-way compression ...

) generated on-fly for each slice, the resulting file is compatible with md5sum or sha1sum, to be able to quickly check each slice's integrity * Filesystem independent: it may be used to restore a system to a partition of a different size and/or to a partition with a different filesystem

Frontends

There are GUI frontends for dar called: * Kdar for Linux, specifically

KDE KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the ...

, * DarGUI for Linux and Windows, * gdar for Linux. A text-mode browser/extractor: plugin for dar files in mc (

Midnight Commander GNU Midnight Commander (also known as mc, the command used to start it, and as mouseless commander in older versions) is a free cross-platform orthodox file manager. It was started by Miguel de Icaza in 1994 as a clone of the then-popular Nor ...

). A scheduler / command-line frontend known as SaraB allows the

Towers of Hanoi The Tower of Hanoi (also called The problem of Benares Temple or Tower of Brahma or Lucas' Tower and sometimes pluralized as Towers, or simply pyramid puzzle) is a mathematical game or puzzle consisting of three rods and a number of disks of v ...

, Grandfather-Father-Son, or any custom backup rotation strategy, and modifications are available for PAR file support. Extended versions known as bzSaraB and baras are also available.

References

External links

Homepage of dar
{{Archive formats 2002 software Free data compression software Free backup software

Features

Frontends

See also

References

External links