DAR  -  D i s k    A R c h i v e

PRESENTATION

Dar is a shell interface to the libdar library. This library is provided here beside dar and can also be accessed through Web interface (https://edrusb.github.io/webdar/) as well as desktop applications and more as listed here: http://dar.linux.free.fr/doc/presentation.html#external_tools

FEATURES

The libdar library features include in particular:

• full, differential, incremental and decremental backups
• binary delta (including recursive binary delta with incremental backups)
• directory tree snapshots (for later comparing or base of a diff backup)
• catalog isolation (small file containing the table of content of a backup) can be used as rescue in case of corruption or as reference for incrementa and differential backup in place of the backup itself
• selective compression (not compressing already compressed files)
• Strong encryption (symmetric and asymmetric keys supported)
• multi-threading support for compression and encryption
• remote backup storage (FTP and SFTP)
• backup slicing in several files a given size
• hard-links and any inode type backup and restoration
• sparse file handling
• Extended Attributes support (Linux ACL, MacOS file Forks...)
• Path based filtering
• Filename based filtering
• File-system based filtering
• Extended Attribute based filtering
• All filters are available at backup but also at restoration time
• Cache Directory Tagging Standard automatic directory exclusion
• backup repairing or catalog regeneration (for example in case of storage saturation during a backup operation)
• very fast and efficient restoration (even of a few files from a huge multi terabytes backup)
• hooks for user scripts to run at slice boundary and/or before and after backing up some given files and directories.
• Database to ease the restoration from a large amount of full, differential, incremental backups eventually using binary delta
• backup merging and sub-setting (without restoration to file-system) for the main features...

On the command-line side, dar is the main command to handle 90% of libdar features. But some features are better handled from separated commands (though still relying on libdar): Actually the Dar project include a set of six command-line programs beside the libdar library: dar dar_xform dar_slave dar_manager dar_cp dar_split

with in addition: dar_static (statically linked version of dar, not all system support static linking) dar_cp_static (statically linked version of dar_cp)

LICENSING

The whole Dar project, including thus the libdar library is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL in the following). This means you can link libdar to your programs at the condition your programs are also covered by the GPL, which says in particular that you must provide source code of your programs. See COPYING file for details.

SUPPORTED OS

Dar and libdar are available under:

• Linux (almost all distros do provide packages of dar and libdar)
• Windows (95, 2000, NT, XP, 7, 8, 10...),
• OpenSolaris,
• FreeBSD
• NetBSD,
• Mac OS X,
• Rasperry Pi ...for the known platform+OS it has been tested against or reported to be working on.

DOCUMENTATION

Documentation is embedded in the code and built during the compilation process, see doc/README. A built version is also available online at: http://dar.linux.free.fr/doc

INSTALLATION

see INSTALL file