DAR (Disk Archiver)

DAR (Disk Archiver)
DAR
Stable release 2.4.2 / 5th Sept. 2011
Operating system Cross-platform
Type Data compression
License GPL
Website dar.linux.free.fr

DAR (Disk ARchive) is a command-line archiving tool and a replacement for tar.

It 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.
  • Incremental backup,
  • Decremental backup,
  • Takes care of hard-linked inodes (hard-linked plain files, char devices, block devices, hard-linked symlinks (!))
  • Takes care of sparse files,
  • Takes care of Posix Extended Attributes, which implies Posix File ACL under Linux and File forks under MacOS X,
  • Per-file compression with gzip, bzip2 or lzo (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, twofish, AES, serpent, camellia encryption.
  • 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
  • Live Database backup: a user command can be launched before and after saving a particular set of files or directories, suitable to put a database in a consistent state during its backup,
  • hash file (md5 or sha1) 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,
  • Tested under Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, Mac OS X and some other systems.

Frontends

There are GUI frontends for DAR called Kdar or DarGUI (for Linux). A text-mode extractor: plugin for dar files in mc (midnight commander).

A scheduler / command-line frontend known as SaraB allows the Towers of Hanoi, 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.

See also

External links