Introduction

KDar is the “KDE Disk archiver”, a disk-based archiving and backup utility.

KDar is built around the “disk archive library” by Denis Corbin, and is similar in function to his “DAR” program. DAR is somewhat analogous to the “tape archiver” shell command “tar”, but is better suited for backups onto disk-based media, such as CD-R's, DVDs, Jazz, Zip, other hard-drives, etc.

KDar can perform differential backups, which means that it can quickly store the differences between a recent full backup and the current state of your data.

KDar now supports strong encryption based on the blowfish algorithm.

A sophisticated file filtering mechanism allows you to select which files and directories to backup or restore, and which files to compress.

Furthermore, a small catalog can be copied from the archive, which means you don't need your archive CD's to do a differential backup of the entire filesystem. You just need to store the much smaller catalog file on your filesystem.

KDar remembers your settings between sessions. You can customize your backup settings into different profiles, too. For example, you might have one profile for doing system-wide backups, and another profile for backing up only your digital camera images and email.

Best of all, restoring files is easy! You can restore individual files or directories, even entire archives, from KDar's convenient tree-view interface. KDar's archives are fully compatible with dar (they are just DAR archives, after all), so if you don't have access to X-windows, you can still perform tests and restorations using Denis Corbin's dar command from a text console. You can even export dar scripts from within KDar ahead of time and store them with your archives. This makes full restoration very straight-forward with the help of a boot disk, like Trinux, or one from your favourite GNU/Linux distribution. I've done complete restores on my laptop twice, and that was after completely overwriting the hard drive with "That Other OS".

The next section describes KDar's features in more detail.