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Recoverable File Archiving with Free Software?

Posted by Cliff on from the redundancy-for-your-files dept.

Viqsi asks: "Back in my Win32 days, I was a very frequent user of RAR archives. I've had them get hit by partial hardware failures and still be recoverable, so I've always liked them, but they're completely non-Free, and the mini-RMS in my brain tells me this could be a problem for long-term archival. The closest free equivalent I can find is .tar.bz2, and while bzip2 has some recovery ability, tar is (as far as I have ever been able to tell) incapable of recovering anything past the damaged point, which is unacceptable for my purposes. I've recently had to pick up a copy of RAR for Linux to dig into one of those old archives, so this question's come back up for me again, and I still haven't found anything. Does anyone know of a file archive type that can recover from this kind of damage?"

6 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. wow man by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    the mini-RMS in my brain

    You really ought to have that looked at..

    1. Re:wow man by Viqsi · · Score: 4, Funny

      Y'know, I would've done that a long time ago, but my health care provider doesn't cover ideologuectomies. They claim that it doesn't threaten your physical life, just your social one. The bastards.

      :D

      --

      --
      viqsi - See "vixen"
      If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
  2. Yes... by caesar79 · · Score: 4, Funny

    its an amazing technology...only quite involved.
    Basically you concatenate all the files together (cat should do), print it out on good 32lb paper, get a professor's signature and file it in a college lib...heard those things stick around for centuries

  3. Re:Par2 works great by Zapper · · Score: 2, Funny

    Just a pity that no sane amount of PAR files will compensate for my ISPs lame news feed. :-(

    --
    So much to do, so little bandwidth.
    --
    Try Mozilla
  4. Re:Try apio by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    hey no fair, double mod points for your typo!

  5. RAR Archives by vasqzr · · Score: 4, Funny


    Back in my Win32 days, I was a very frequent user of RAR archives.

    Bablefish translation: I was a huge warez kiddie.

    On a related noted, were there any wide-spread, legitimate uses of .RAR? I only remember .ARJ and .ZIP