zpaqfranz: advanced multiversioned archiver, with HW acceleration and SFX (on Windows)

🖥️ catpaq — Official GUI open-source ready to use on many platforms

📥 Direct Downloads (latest versions)

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Swiss army knife for backup and disaster recovery

like 7z or RAR on steroids, with deduplicated 'snapshots' (versions).
Conceptually similar to Mac's Time Machine, but much more efficient.
A zpaq 7.15 fork.

📦 zpaqfranz Downloads & Packages

🪟 Windows Binaries

| Variant | Download | Install command | Version | Notes | |--------------------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|----------------------------------|---------|-------| | Everything | SourceForge | — | | All files in one place | | Windows 64 (recommended) | zpaqfranz.exe | zpaqfranz upgrade -force | | HW acceleration auto-detect (SHA1/SHA2) + self-update | | Windows 32 | zpaqfranz32.exe | zpaqfranz32 upgrade -force | | Limited RAM/threads – slower | | Windows 64 HW | zpaqfranzhw.exe | zpaqfranzhw -force | | Extra SHA1 acceleration (AMD ~+1.5%) – use -hw switch | | Windows 64 Full | zpaqfranz-full.exe | — | | All libraries included (no internet needed) | | Windows 64 Open | zpaqfranz-open.exe | — | | 100% open-source, no binary blobs – high-security |

🐧 Linux / BSD / Unix Packages

| OS / Distro | Versione | Install command | Demo | |-------------|----------|-----------------|------| | | | pkg_add zpaqfranz | — | | | | pkg install zpaqfranz | — | | | | brew install zpaqfranz | — | | | | sudo zypper install zpaqfranz | — | | | | apt-get install zpaqfranz | — | | | | sudo apt install zpaqfranz | ▶️ Desktop | | | | AUR (zpaqfranz-git) | ▶️ Terminal | | | | Download | — |

Classic file archivers (tar, 7z, RAR etc) are obsolete when used for repeated backups (daily, weekly, etc) compared to the ZPAQ algorithm that maintains "snapshots" (versions) of the data. This is even more true in the case of ASCII dumps of databases (e.g. MySQL/MariaDB)

Let's see. Archiving a folder multiple times (5), simulating a daily run Monday-to-Friday, with 7z:

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/77727889/215149589-0f2d9f91-ea5a-4f60-b587-f2a506148fe9.mp4

Same, but with zpaqfranz:

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/77727889/215148702-edb8e5bb-8f4e-42bb-9637-6ee98742318a.mp4

As you can see, the .7z "daily" 5x backups takes ~ 5x the space of the .zpaq ones.

Seeing is believing ("real world")

I thought it's best to show the difference with a more realistic example.

Physical (small fileserver) Xeon machine with 8 cores, 64GB RAM and NVMe disks, plus Solaris-based NAS, 1Gb ethernet

Rsync update from filesystem to filesystem (real speed):

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/77727889/215152167-c6ce107a-6345-4060-b7a7-33ad30b269ee.mp4

Rsync update to Solaris NAS (real speed):

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/77727889/215152259-2baa7001-d838-40de-b56c-6fe3feff9f1b.mp4

Backup update from file system with zpaqfranz (real speed):

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/77727889/215146670-1a11cd5d-6f00-4544-b797-9ca288ae12b1.mp4

Backup upgrade via zfsbackup (real speed):

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/77727889/215147310-cc760f20-08b8-4088-9d8a-f58f00eac211.mp4

What?

At every run only data changed since the last execution will be added, creating a new version (the "snapshot"). It is then possible to restore the data @ the single version, just like snapshots by zfs or virtual machines, but a single-file level.

• Keeps a forever-to-ever copy (even thousands of versions), conceptually similar to Mac's time machine, but much more efficiently.
• Ideal for virtual machine disk storage (ex backup of vmdk), virtual disks (VHDx) and even TrueCrypt containers.
• Easily handles millions of files and tens of TBs of data.
• Allows rsync (or zfs replica) copies to the cloud with minimal data transfer and encryption.
• Multiple possibilities of data verification, fast, advanced and even paranoid.
• Some optimizations for modern hardware (aka: SSD, NVMe, multithread).
• By default triple-check with "chunked" SHA-1, XXHASH64 and CRC-32 (!).
  For even higher level of paranoia, it is possible to use others hash algorithms, as
  • MD5
  • SHA-1 of the full-file (NIST FIPS 180-4)
  • XXH3-128
  • BLAKE3 128
  • SHA-2-256 (NIST FIPS 180-4)
  • SHA-3-256 (NIST FIPS 202)
  • WHIRLPOOL (ISO/IEC 10118-3)
  • HIGHWAY (64,128,256)
  • ...And much more.

No complex (and fragile) repository folders, with hundreds of "whatever", just only a single file!

Windows client? Minimum size (without software) VSS backups

It is often important to copy the %desktop% folder, Thunderbird's data, %download% and generally the data folders of a Windows system, leaving out the programs.

Real speed (encrypted) update of C: without software (-frugal):

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/77727889/215269540-8e2c8641-0d3a-4f67-a243-ab617834c5de.mp4

Are you a really paranoid Windows user (like me)? You can get sector-level copies of C:, too.

In this case the space used is obviously larger, as is the execution time, but even the "most difficult" folders are also taken. Deliberately the bitmap of occupied clusters is ignored: If you are paranoid, be all the way down!

It is just like dd; you can't (for now) restore with zpaqfranz. You have to extract to a temporary folder and then use other software (e.g., 7z, OSFMount) to extract the files directly from the image

Accelerated speed (encrypted) every-sector update of a 256GB C: @ ~150MB/s:

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/77727889/215271199-94400833-f973-41d2-a018-3f2277a648a9.mp4

To date, there is no software, f