Chapter 1. Introduction

Overview

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 more suited for backups onto disk-based media, such as CD-R's, DVD's, 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.

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 extracted 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.

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