DarGUI is a graphical interface to Denis Corbin's DAR backup utility.

DAR works in a similar manner to the shell command “tar”, but is better suited for backups onto disk-based media, such as CD-R's, DVDs, Jazz, Zip, other hard-drives, etc. as backups can be split into any number of "slices" or individual files which can be stored on different media. 

DarGUI 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 file filtering mechanism allows you to select which files and directories to backup or restore, and which files to compress.

Details of the files stored in each archive are contained in a catalogue which can be extracted and stored independently of the archive, which means you don't need your archive CDs to do a differential backup of the entire filesystem. You just need to store the much smaller catalog file on your filesystem.

Best of all, restoring files is easy! You can restore individual files or directories, even entire archives, by selecting them using DarGUI's tree-view interface. Archives written using DarGUI are normal DAR archives and if necessary their contents can be restored from a text console using the dar command.

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