Dar's Documentation - General Presentation

# Dar Presentation

## General Presentation

Dar is a command-line software aimed to backup and archiving large live filesystems. It is a filesystem independent and cross platform tool. But, Dar is not a boot loader, nor it is an operating system. It does not create nor format partitions, but it can restore a full filesystem into a larger or a shorter partition, from one partition to several ones, (or the opposite from several to one partition), from a filesystem type to another filesystem type (ext2/3/4 to reiserFS for example).

Saves all data and metadata
  - it can save and restore hard-linked of any inodes type (hard linked plain files, sockets, char/block devices or even hard linked symlinks (!)),*
  - Solaris's Door files,
  - it takes care of Extended Attributes (Linux, MacOS, ...).
  - MaCOS X file forks
  - ACL (Linux, Solaris,...)
  - It can also detect and restore sparse files, even when the underlying filesystem does not support them, leading to an additional gain in backup space requirement, but mostly at restoration time a disk space optimization that garanty you always be able to restore you backup on a volume of same space (which is not true for backup tools that ignore howsparse file are stored on filesytems)
Suitable for Live filesystem backup
  Thanks to its ability to detect file change during backup it can retry the backup of a particular file, but has also some mechanism that let the user define some actions for before and after saving a given type of file, before or after entering a given directory, and so on. Such action can be a simple user script or a more complex executable, there is no constraint.
Embedded Compression
  Of course backup can be compressed with a large variety of protocols (gzip, bzip2, lzma/xz, lzo, zstd, lz4, and more to come), but the compression is done per file, leading to a great backup file robustness at the cost of unoticeable degradation of the compression ratio. But doing let you tell dar which file to compress and which one not trying to, saving a lot of CPU cycles.
Embedded Encryption
  Strong encryption is available with several well known and reputed algorithms (blowfish, aes, twofish, serpent, camellia... but also by mean of public/private keys integrating GPG encrytion and signing), securing your data is not only a matter of ciphering algorithm, it is also a matter of protection against code book/dictionnary attack. For that purpose, when encryption is activated, data is floating inside the archive at a random position, thanks to two elastic buffers one added at the beginning of the archive, the other at the end. Last a KDF function with salt and parametrable iteration count increase the strength of the human provided key lead the encryption to use a different key even when the human provide the same password/passphrase for two different backups.
Cloud compatible backup tool
  in addition to embedded encrytion, dar can directly use SSH/SFTP or FTP to write and read your backup to a remote storage (Cloud, NAS,...), without requiring any local storage. You can also leverage the possibily to split a backup in files of given size (called slices) to store your backup on removable storage (tapes, disks,...) even low end Blue-Ray, DVD-RW, CD-RW, ... or floppies (!) if you still have them... In that context it may be interesting to also leverage the easy integration of dar with Parchive to not only detect corruption and prevent restoring a corrupted system unnoticed, but also to repair your backup.
Many backup flavors available
  Dar can perform full backup1, incremental backup2, differential backup3 and decremental backup4. It also records files that have been removed since the last backup was made, leading the restoration of a system to get the exact same state it was at the time of the differential/incremental/decremental backup (removing files that ought to be removed, adding files that ought to be added and modifing files as expected).
Binary Delta
  For differential and incremental backups, you can also leverage the binary delta which leads dar to create patch of large files when they change instead of saving them all at once even if a few bytes changed (mailboxes, and so on.). A filtering mechanism let you decide which file can be saved as patch when they change and which one will always be saved as a whole when they change.
Easy automation
  User commands and scripts can be run from dar at each new slice boundary, but also before and after saving some specified type of files and directories. It also provides a documented API and Python binding.
Good quality software
  Dar was born in 2002 and thanks to its modular source code and highly abstracted datastructures, the many features that were added since then, never lead the developper to touch already existing features for that. Modularity and abstraction are the two pilars of the dar/libdar quality.

## Dar is easy to use

While dar/libdar provide a lot of features we will not mention here, you can use dar without having the knowledge of all of them. In its most simple form, dar can be used only with few options, here follows some example of use, that should not need additional explanations:

Backing up all the `/usr` directory:
  `dar --create my_backup --fs-root / --go-into usr`
Restoration (restoring `/usr` in a alternate directory):
  `dar --extract my_backup --fs-root /some/where/else`
Testing backup sanity:
  `dar --test my_backup`
Comparing a backup content with the existing filesystem:
  `dar --diff my_backup --fs-root /`

## Dar is well documented

A big effort has been made on documentation, but does not mean you have to read it all to be able to use dar, as this one is very easy to use:

- most needs are covered by the tutorial or mini-howto
- and for direct explanation of common questions by the FAQ.
- Then, if you like or if you need, you can also look at the detailed man pages for a particular feature (These man documents are the reference for each command-line tool you will get very detailed explanations).
- You may also find some help on the dar-support mailing-list where a bit more than a hundred of subscribed users can help you.

Dar's documentation is big because it also includes all that may be useful to know how to use libdar, which is intended for developers of external application relying on this library. For those even more curious there is also the documentation about dar's internals: libdar's structure, archive format, which can ease the understanding of the magic that makes all this working and gives a better understanding of dar/libdar code, which is written in C++. But, no, you do not need to read all this to just use dar! ;-)

Follows an abstracted list of features if you want to know more about dar/libdar from high level point of view

## Known Projects relying on dar or libdar

Projects in alphabetical order:

- AVFS by Ralf Hoffmann, is virtual file system layer for transparently accessing the content of archives and remote directories just like local files.
- backup.pl script by Bob Rogers, creates and verifies a backup using dump/restore or using dar
- Baras by Aaron D. Marasco it a rewriting in Perl of SaraB.
- dar-backup by Per Jensen, to automate and simplify the use of dar with redundancy, remote backup, backup testing after transfer and many other interesting features, like for example the backup definitions and logs management
- new in 2025: dar-backup v2 also by Per Jensen, is a reimplementation in python of the e dar-backup (v1) program he made in 2022 and has some added features.
- new in 2025: dar-backup-image yet also by Per Jensen, is a docker image bundling dar and dar-backup. This image makes it easy to run `dar-backup` in a clean, isolated container environment perfect for use in cron jobs, systemd timers, or CI pipeline...
- Dar-incdec-repo by Dan A. Muresan is a framework for doing periodic DAR backups with minimal fuss
- dar_fuse by !evil, provides a faster AVFS equivalent thanks to its direct use of libdar python API and fusepy module.
- Darbup by Carlo Teubner. One of darbup key features is its ability to automatically delete old archives when the total space taken up by existing archives exceeds some configured maximum
- Darbrrd by Jared Jennings, to back up a few hundred gigabytes of data onto dozens of optical discs in a way that it can be restored ten years later.
- DarGUI by Malcolm Poole is a front-end to dar providing simple and graphical access to the main features of dar.
- new in 2025: ddn-lib-dar a libdar binding for the D programming language, by Dejan Lekic.
- Disk archive interface for Emacs by Stefan Reichör
- gdar by Tobias Specht, a graphical user interface to browse and extract dar archives
- HUbackup (Home User backup) by SivanGreen
- kdar is a KDE-3 Graphical User Interface to dar made by Johnathan Burchill
- Lazy Backup by Daniel Johnson. Lazy Backup is intended to be so easy even lazy people will do their backups
- A Dar plugin has been made by Guus Jansman for Midnight commander (mc)
- SaraB: Schedule And Rotate Automatic Backups - by Tristan Rhodes. SaraB works with DAR to schedule and rotate backups. Supports the Towers of Hanoi, Grandfather-Father-Son, or any custom backup rotation strategy.
- new in 2025: Webdar: by Denis Corbin a single small binary (8 kiB) embedding a web server, libdar, a FTP and SFTP client to store/access backups remotely, providing a graphically set of customizable configurations that can be saved/load to disk and/or uploaded/download throuh the HTTP/S session.

If a project you know is missing, you are welcome to contact dar's author for it to be referred here (contact coordinates can be found in the AUTHOR file of the source package).

1 Full backup: A full backup is a backup of a full filesystem or of a subset of files where, for each file, the archive contains all the inode information (ownership, permission, dates, etc.) file's data and eventually file's Extended Attributes.

2 Differential backup: A differential backup is based on a full backup. It contains only the data and Extended Attributes of files that changed since the full backup was made. It also contains the list of files that have been removed since the full backup was made. For files that did not change, it contains only the inode information. The advantage is that the backup process is much faster, the space required is also much lower. The drawback is that you need to restore the full backup first, then the differential backup to get the last saved state of your system. But if you want the last version of a file that changed recently you only need the last differential backup.

3 Incremental backup: An incremental backup is essentially the same thing as a differential backup. Some make a difference, I do not. The only point I see is that the incremental backup is not based on a full backup but on a differential backup or on another incremental one.

4 Decremental backup: A decremental backup is a backup method in which the most recent backup is a full backup, while the oldest backup are a difference compared to that full backup. The advantage of such type of backup is the you can restore easily your system in the last state it had using only the last backup. And, if you want to restore it in the state it had some time before, then you can restore the last backup (full backup), then the previous archive (a decremental backup) and so on. As you most usually want to restore the system in its last available state, this makes restoration much more easy compared to doing incremental backups. However, this suffer from a important drawback, which is that you need to transform the last backup into a decremental backup when comes the time to make another backup. Then you have to remove the former full backup and replace it by its decremental version.