Last Updated on March 10, 2026
Disk ARchive (DAR) is a full featured archiver with support for differential backups, slices, compression, ATTR/ACL support. DAR also supports pipes for remote operations, including with ssh. It can remove files during restoration.
This application can store a backup in several files (called “slices” in the following) of a given size, eventually pausing or running a user command/script before starting the next slice.
There are graphical user interfaces available for DAR including KDar and DarGUI, although KDar is unmaintained.
Key Features
- Directory tree snapshot recording the inode status of files.
- Compression including:
- Per-file compression with gzip or bzip2 (as opposed to compressing the whole archive).
- Fast extraction of files.
- Fast listing of archive files.
- Strong Blowfish encryption.
- Flat restoration.
- Filters.
- Support slices, archives split over multiple files of a particular size.
- Direct Access – Dar first reads the catalogue (i.e. the contents of the backup), then it goes directly to the location of the saved file(s) you want to restore and proceed to restoration.
- Full or differential backup.
- Hard links.
- Extended attributes.
- Archive testing – detect data corruption in the archive.
- Remote operations.
- Isolation – the catalogue (i.e. the contents of an archive) can be extracted (this operation is called isolation) to a small file, that can in turn be used as reference for differential archive.
- Re-shape slices of an existing archive.
- Scrambling – the archive can be scrambled by using a pass phrase.
- Data protection.
- Archive merging – merge two existing archives into one archive.
- Archive subsetting – define a subset of files from an archive and put them into a new archive without having to really extract these files to disk.
- Cross-platform support – runs under Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, macOS, Solaris, and Windows.
Website: dar.linux.free.fr
Support: Documentation, FAQ
Developer: Denis Corbin
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
dar is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
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Read our verdict in the software roundup.
| Terminal-Based Archive Managers | |
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Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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