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 Execution (computing), execute. It is one component of software, which also includes software documentation, documentation and other intangibl ...
, 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 b ...
in
Unix-like
A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix 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 Uni ...
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
s.
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
In information technology, a backup, or data backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb form, referring to the process of doing so, is "back up", ...
*
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 ...
*
Incremental backup
An incremental backup is one in which successive copies of the data contain only the portion that has changed since the preceding backup copy was made. When a full recovery is needed, the restoration process would need the last full backup plus al ...
,
* Decremental backup
* Takes care of any type of
inode
An inode (index node) is a data structure in a Unix-style file system that describes a file-system object such as a file or a directory. Each inode stores the attributes and disk block locations of the object's data. File-system object attribu ...
(directory, plain files,
symlinks
In computing, a symbolic link (also symlink or soft link) is a file whose purpose is to point to a file or directory (called the "target") by specifying a path thereto.
Symbolic links are supported by POSIX and by most Unix-like operating system ...
,
special devices,
named pipes,
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 secu ...
, ...)
* Takes care of
hard-linked inodes (hard-linked plain files,
char devices,
block device
In Unix-like operating systems, a device file, device node, 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 spec ...
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 blo ...
s
* Takes care of Linux file
Extended Attributes,
* 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 ...
,
bzip2
bzip2 is a free and open-source file compression program that uses the Burrows–Wheeler algorithm. It only compresses single files and is not a file archiver. It relies on separate external utilities such as tar for tasks such as handli ...
,
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,
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. Two ...
,
AES,
Serpent,
Camellia
''Camellia'' (pronounced or ) is a genus of flowering plants in the family Theaceae. They are found in tropical and subtropical areas in East Asia, eastern and South Asia, southern Asia, from the Himalayas east to Japan and Indonesia. There are ...
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 partit ...
)
* 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
Hash, hashes, hash mark, or hashing may refer to:
Substances
* Hash (food), a coarse mixture of ingredients, often based on minced meat
* Hash (stew), a pork and onion-based gravy found in South Carolina
* Hash, a nickname for hashish, a canna ...
file (
MD5
The MD5 message-digest algorithm is a widely used hash function producing a 128-bit hash value. MD5 was designed by Ronald Rivest in 1991 to replace an earlier hash function MD4, and was specified in 1992 as Request for Comments, RFC 1321.
MD5 ...
,
SHA1
In cryptography, SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) is a hash function which takes an input and produces a 160- bit (20-byte) hash value known as a message digest – typically rendered as 40 hexadecimal digits. It was designed by the United State ...
or
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 enable collaborative work on its projects. Its products include the KDE Plasma gra ...
,
* DarGUI for Linux and Windows,
* gdar for Linux.
A text-mode browser/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
*
FSArchiver
*
List of file archivers
*
List of archive formats
This is a list of file formats used by file archiver, archivers and data compression, compressors used to create Archive file, archive files.
Archive formats by purpose
Archive formats are used for backups, mobility, and archiving. Many archive ...
*
Comparison of archive formats
References
External links
Homepage of dar
{{Archive formats
2002 software
Free data compression software
Free backup software