DarGUI is a graphical frontend for the Disk ARchiving utility (DAR) that aims to make it easier and quicker to perform common backup tasks using DAR. It uses the GTK+ library, which is installed on most Linux distributions, so usually the only additional dependency is DAR.

DarGUI aims to complement and enhance the command line features of DAR rather than conceal them, and to help users to learn how DAR works so that they can use it from the command line when necessary. It is written in Pascal using FreePascal and the Lazarus IDE.

Dar is a versatile format intended primarily for creating backup archives which can be stored on removable media of any number and size. A single DAR archive can be saved in separate files (called slices) on an appropriate number of floppy disks, CD-R, DVD-R, CD-RW, DVD-RW, Zip, flash memory sticks, etc., whatever is most convenient.

Dar offers a string of features for managing backup archives, including the ability to compare archived files with those currently on the filesystem and to make differential backups. Archive catalogues can be extracted and retained on the system for reference.  For a full list of the features offered by Dar see Dar's Features. Dar's author, Denis Corbin, has provided excellent and detailed documentation which is essential reading for anyone using DarGUI.

The Dar command line utility offers an immense number of features for creating, restoring and manipulating backup archives. Johnathan K. Burchill's KDar provides an extremely flexible GUI for Dar but in December 2007 it had not been updated for almost two years. Compiling with recent releases of KDE presented problems and KDar packages were no longer available for many recent Linux distributions.

DarGUI was conceived as an attempt to provide a substitute for KDar for users who simply want an easy way of accessing the most common and widely-used functions of Dar. Unlike KDar, which by-passes Dar to access the libdar libraries directly, DarGUI is simply a means of compiling a Dar command which is executed in a console. It does as little as possible to hide the Dar command line from the user, because for more complex operations knowledge of the Dar commandline is essential.

DarGUI is released in DEB and RPM format to allow easy installation. Tim Abell has created a 64bit DEB package for DarGUI v. 0.4.1.

The default language used by DarGUI is English but it also ships with localisation files in the French and Spanish languages. At present DarGUI provides the following features:

• view the contents of DAR archives
• select files from an archive for extraction using filemasks
• view archive statistics (number of files, compression information, etc)
• extract/ restore selected or all files from an archive
• create new archives using a limited range of options which include a specified slice size, compression, file and directory filters
• create differential archives
• isolate archive catalogues
• compare files in an archive with those in the filesystem
• check the integrity of files in a backup archive
• schedule backups to be done regularily or once in the future
• creation and opening of encrypted archives

If there are any other features which you feel should be included or you have any suggestions for implementing the present ones differently, please let me know either by submitting a feature request or by email.

- All versions up to and including 0.5.0 are unable to work with files which have bash shell 'special' characters (eg. apostrophes) in the archive name or path. This will be fixed in the next release.
- Most features are unavailable if the version of Dar installed is configured to use a language other than English.

Please report any bugs that you find, ether by using the SourceForge Bug Tracker or by email to mgpoole@users.sourceforge.net