zpaqfranz is a deduplicating archiver with encryption and paranoid-level tests. It’s billed as a Swiss army knife for the serious backup and disaster recovery manager.
At each run only data changed since the last execution is 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.
This is free and open source software.
Features include:
- Conceptually similar to the macOS Time Machine.
- 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.
- Other hash algorithms can be used including:
- 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.
- Cross-platform support – runs under Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, macOS, and Windows.
Website: github.com/fcorbelli/zpaqfranz
Support:
Developer: Franco Corbelli
License: MIT License

zpaqfranz is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Terminal-Based Archive Managers | |
|---|---|
| DAR | Disk ARchive: Backup directory tree and files |
| tar | A file archiver and archive format developed since the early days of Unix |
| zpaqfranz | Deduplicating archiver with encryption and paranoid-level tests |
| patool | Portable archive file manager |
| 7-Zip | File archiver with a high compression ratio |
| tarlz | Massively parallel combined implementation of tar and lzip |
| TUI Archiver | Terminal application to list / manage archives |
| Simple Archiver | Fairly wide range of features |
| tarnation | Simple, extensible tar backup/restore utility |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
| Alternatives to tar | |
|---|---|
| TUI Archiver | List / manage archives |
| tarlz | Massively parallel combined implementation of tar and lzip |
| tarnation | Simple, extensible tar backup/restore utility |
| patool | Portable archive file manager that focuses on simplicity |
| zpaqfranz | Deduplicating archiver with encryption and paranoid-level tests |
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