DAR (Disk Archiver)

DAR (Disk ARchive) is a command-line archiving tool and a replacement for tar.

It features:

Support for slices, archives split over multiple files of a particular size.
Option of deleting files from the system which are removed in the archive.
Incremental backup,
Decremental backup,
Takes care of hard-linked inodes (hard-linked plain files, char devices, block devices, hard-linked symlinks (!))
Takes care of sparse files,
Takes care of Posix Extended Attributes, which implies Posix File ACL under Linux and File forks under MacOS X,
Per-file compression with gzip, bzip2 or lzo (as opposed to compressing the whole archive). An individual can choose not to compress already compressed files based on their filename suffix.
Fast-extracting of files from anywhere in the archive.
Fast listing of archive contents through saving the catalogue of files in the archive.
Optional blowfish, twofish, AES, serpent, camellia encryption.
Live filesystem backup: detects when a file has been modified while it was read for backup and can retry saving it up to a given maximum number of retries
Live Database backup: a user command can be launched before and after saving a particular set of files or directories, suitable to put a database in a consistent state during its backup,
hash file (md5 or sha1) generated on-fly for each slice, the resulting file is compatible with md5sum or sha1sum, to be able to quickly check each slice's integrity,
Tested under Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, Mac OS X and some other systems.

Frontends

There are GUI frontends for DAR called Kdar or DarGUI (for Linux). A text-mode extractor: plugin for dar files in mc (midnight commander).

A scheduler / command-line frontend known as SaraB allows the Towers of Hanoi, Grandfather-Father-Son, or any custom backup rotation strategy, and modifications are available for PAR file support. Extended versions known as bzSaraB and baras are also available.