Dar (disk archiver)

dar
Initial release	2 February 2002; 23 years ago
Stable release	2.7.16 / 8 December 2024
Repository	DAR Repository
Operating system	Linux; Windows; Solaris; FreeBSD; NetBSD; macOS;
Type	Data compression
License	GPL-2.0-or-later
Website	dar.linux.free.fr

dar (disk archive) is a computer program, a command-line archiving tool^[4] intended as a replacement for tar in Unix-like operating systems.^{[citation needed]}

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
Incremental backup,
Decremental backup
Takes care of any type of inode (directory, plain files, symlinks, special devices, named pipes, sockets, doors, ...)
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 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, 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, Twofish, AES, Serpent, Camellia encryption
Optional public key encryption and signature (OpenPGP)
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 or SHA-512) 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^[5]

Frontends

There are GUI frontends for dar called:

Kdar for Linux, specifically KDE,
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.