Dar
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Parent page: Storage and file management
The dar (stands for Disk ARchiver) utility was written from the ground up as a modern
replacement to the classical Unix tar tool. First released in 2002, dar is open
source, is actively maintained, and can be compiled on any Unix-like system. Similar to tar,
dar supports full / differential / incremental backups. Unlike tar, each
dar includes a file index for fast file access and restore from large
archives. dar has built-in compression on a file-by-file basis, making it more resilient
against data corruption, and you can optionally tell it not to compress already highly compressed files,
such as mp4 video and gz files. dar supports strong encryption,
can split archives at 1-byte resolution, supports extended file attributes, sparse files, hard and
symbolic (soft) links, can detect data corruption in both headers and saved data and recover with minimal
data loss, and has many other desirable features. On the dar page you can find a detailed feature-by-feature tar-dar comparison.