Dar (Disk ARchive)

black3dynamite

I discovered this shell command called dar that is used to backup files.

http://dar.linux.free.fr/
http://dar.linux.free.fr/doc/Limitations.html
http://dar.linux.free.fr/doc/presentation.html
http://dar.linux.free.fr/doc/man/dar.html
http://dar.linux.free.fr/doc/Tutorial.html
http://dar.linux.free.fr/doc/mini-howto/dar-differential-backup-mini-howto.en.html

For Windows Users
https://chocolatey.org/packages/dar
choco install dar

When using dar on Windows, the path is based on the Unix way.
c:\temp\user1 has to be written /cygdrive/c/temp/user1

# Create backup
dar -c /cygdrive/c/temp/backup -R /cygdrive/c/temp/user1

# Restore backup
dar -x /cygdrive/c/temp/backup -R /cygdrive/c/temp/restore

# Test backup
dar -t /cygdrive/c/temp/backup

# Compare backup
dar -d /cygdrive/c/temp/backup -R /cygdrive/c/temp/user1

# List backup contents
dar -l /cygdrive/c/temp/backup

For macOS Users
https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/dar
brew install dar

For Fedora Users
sudo dnf install dar

For CentOS Users
sudo yum install dar

For Debian/Ubuntu Users
sudo apt install dar

Obsolesce

Looks pretty standard at a glance. How's it differ over other disk archiving backup tools?

travisdh1

People were starting to talk about how dar would replace tar in general usage way back in the early 2000s. Nice to see that it hasn't been completely forgotten about.

black3dynamite

@Obsolesce said in Dar (Disk ARchive):

Looks pretty standard at a glance. How's it differ over other disk archiving backup tools?

I still prefer restic, but I could use this as an alternative to tar.