DAR - Disk ARchive Reviews

Dar is my go-to backup solution. The problem with the other various archive formats is that if a single byte gets corrupted, then the whole archive after that byte is irretrievable. I mean this with compression and encryption enabled. Such behaviour is rubbish for a backup solution. dar is extremely, extremely feature rich and customisable.

In 12 years of using DAR with some nifty shell scripting my backups have always been a reliable and efficient asset. There isn't a feature I ever did not find in the almighty and well-written DAR man page and I don't know of a software with a better one.

Very good backup utility. Nice features. For example, computing a md5 sum while creating the archive, so you can check the write integrity right after finishing it is brilliant.

Been using DAR for more than 10 years now - on a professional level - without one single problem. It's without doubt THE command line backup tool. Does everything a proper backup utility should do, you just have to learn and conjugate the options to your needs since it does lack a GUI, which is no problem for me, on the contrary!

Excellent and powerful tool, especially when combined with various user-submitted additional scripts. Many options can be confusing but simple backups and restores work well, and the options really prove themselves when you need them! Maintainer is active on support mailing lists.

I find dar very useful. I have created a config file in which I put some comments so I know the meaning of the individual options. This way i can adjust dar to all my needs. I'm pretty sure that no GUI-programm has this variety of options. The program works flawlessly. The regular backups on external USB-disks start by calling up a self written bash skript which is easy to do and allows me to choose easily between incremental and full backup. I gave an "Excellent" to the Design, because the flexibility of the command line cannot be matched by any GUI-program. The man pages are well written, other info is available in the net, and there is a user mailing list.

Take your time to learn it, make your scripts for backup, and let it live on its own - it pays back to learn.

I use this great tool now for over ten years and you can do the simple things like full backups very easily but you also have the capability to also do more sophisticated things like incremental/differential backups. And when your full backups start to eat up your space you can even also retrospectively shrink the older backups to become differential ones in comparison to the newer ones - removing files which have not changed over time. And the dar_manager - if regularly used to maintain your archives - is a big plus if you need to find any previous version of a file.

DAR can do everything you need, it is very well documented and supported.

Hard to believe this got a negative review. Everything about DAR shows attention to detail. Each file is compressed inside the archive, reducing the chance of catastrophic corruption. Commands can be issued at intervals during archive creation - to burn split archives to DVD, for example. Encryption is supported. Another neat feature is the catalogue, which can be used as a reference point for differential network backups, thus reducing network traffic considerably. All in all an excellent piece of software, carefully maintained by a responsive developer. 5 stars.

Great software, and that is not just a words. Excellent in all degrees!

I've been using this for years with zero problems. From reading the mail list I can see support for those who have questions is superb.

A tool with lots of options - some of them apparently untested. Most of the options do actually work flawlessly by now, but the tool still remains cumbersome. Leaner would be better.