DAR (Disk Archiver)

DAR (Disk Archiver)

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,
• Dar is 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.
• Runs under Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, Mac OS X and probably some other systems (dar should run at least under any Unix system).