Recoverable File Archiving with Free Software?

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?"

Comments

Re:Yeah

[sasami]

Par archives is just a scam popularized by cluless usnet abusers. Think about it, if those files really could reconstruct a corrupt rar archive, why not post only the smaller par files ... Get youself double copies and you'll be far better off

Ignore this post. It's either a troll or an idiot.

PAR files substitute for missing pieces. They don't regenerate the whole file by themselves. Go look up how RAID 5 parity works. They're not called PAR files for nothing.

Just because you don't understand how something works has no bearing on the fact that it does work. Except in certain performance-sensitive cases, doubling up is the least intelligent way of adding redundancy.

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Dum de dum.