KDar -- the KDE Disk archiver.
Released under the GPL. See the file "COPYING" for details on
your and my rights with respect to this software.

Copyright (C) 2003,2004,2005 by Johnathan K. Burchill.

KDar is the KDE Disk archiver, a disk-based archiving and backup 
utility.

KDar is built around the "disk archive library" by Denis Corbin, 
and is similar in function to his "DAR" program. DAR is somewhat 
analogous to the "tape archiver" shell command "tar", but is 
better suited for backups onto disk-based media, such as CD-R's, 
DVD's, Jazz, Zip, other hard-drives, etc.

KDar 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.

KDar supports strong encryption based on the blowfish algorithm.

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

Furthermore, a small catalog can be copied from the archive,
which means you don't need your archive CD's to do a differential
backup of the entire filesystem. You just need to store the much smaller
catalog file on your filesystem.

KDar remembers your settings between sessions. You can customize 
your backup settings into different profiles, too. For example, 
you might have one profile for doing system-wide backups, and 
another profile for backing up only your digital camera images and email.

Best of all, restoring files is easy! You can restore individual files 
or directories, even entire archives, from KDar's convenient 
tree-view interface.  KDar's archives are fully compatible 
with dar (they are just DAR archives, after all), so if you don't 
have access to X-windows, you can still perform tests and restorations 
using Denis Corbin's dar command from a text console. You can even 
export dar scripts from within KDar ahead of time and store them with 
your archives. This makes full restoration very straight-forward with 
the help of a boot disk, like Trinux, or one from your favourite 
GNU/Linux distribution. I've done complete restores on my laptop 
twice, and that was after completely overwriting the harddrive 
with "That Other OS".

Enjoy!
Johnathan Burchill
20050219

