zpaqfranz

zpaqfranz is an amazing piece of software. F. Corbelli has continued Dr. Mahoney's original `zpaq` 7.15 code and really made it modern and feature rich. i really wanted to give this 5 stars, but what's holding me back is a couple of things. i think they're minor for the most part, and this is just my humble opinion anyway, but Corbelli has been improving this software for many years, so if he agrees with my opinions, he might just implement the changes. he updates it quite regularly to begin with. first, and the most significant of the two, is the amount of metadata zpaqfranz saves. on Un*x, there's the -tar option which works quite well in saving metadata. it's not perfect, you still lose things like ACLs, extended attributes, and SELinux context, all of which a modern GNU tar can save with the right options (--acls --xattrs --selinux), however, to zpaqfranz's credit, many other metadata areas are preserved, so you're covered if things like nanosecond timestamps or owner/group names and UID/GID are of importance to you. for windows users, however, there doesn't exist a similar -wim option (and -tar is silently ignored), so much of the metadata stored in, say, files on an NTFS volume, go unpreserved. security settings (ACLs) and ownership aren't saved. you can save ADSes with -ads though. i don't know if ADSes are saved with the Un*x builds however, as i typically don't use NTFS in non-Windows environments. i strongly feel that supporting as many of these filesystem extras as possible is best when using this for system backups. for now, i just use 7z.exe to stuff my files into a WIM image, then zpaqfranz that. you lose file-level deduplication and single-file extraction doing it this way though. secondly, the amount of features. i did say earlier that it's feature rich, which generally i like (<3 GNU coreutils), but, no offense to the author(s), it feels a little bloated to me, in my humble opinion. things like dir and cp and utf (commands of zpaqfranz), these are good commands, but they seem less related to a backup and archival utility. maybe they're better suited inside a separate sister command. i'm reminded of the Unix philosophy, DOTADIW, which, this does do each operation well, but it just feels a little cluttered to me. one last detail i consider really just a personal opinion, zpaqfranz's syntax is different to that of traditional Un*x tools. it's more in-line with 7-Zip...which i also am not particularly fond of, haha. neither are bad, they just involve a learning curve to those used to options looking like: -cJvf archive.tbz -b20 --posix -- ./foo these are just my two cents. overall i love this software and have faith in its author(s) to keep making it better with every release. this project has received a lot of love from Corbelli and it shows. i'd recommend zpaqfranz over zpaq 7.15 any day due to its continued support and SHA-1 collision checks, and whole-file checksumming.

Zpaqfranz is such a great software, it really deserves much more recognition! I tried a lot of compressors and they were all either much slower or had worse compression ratios. It has a bunch of useful features too.

The best raw disk imaging and file backup solution out there! Outperforms LZMA by far with huge files, both for speed and compression ratio. Compression ratio and speed both get even better when you add newer images of the same disk on top of the archive. Just perfect for having a 100% complete backup of your entire disk with partition table, deleted files and everything. The original zpaq was really good but not super fast. Zpaqfranz is super fast. It being cross platform and in a single, small binary is just the cherry on top. The developer, Franco, is really smart and helps you out extremely fast. There's really nothing like it, it's an essential piece of software for my work now.

zpaqfranz is an excellent piece of software for incremental backups. It offers amazing compression and a huge variety of features. The developer is responsive on github and reacts fast to issues.

Amazing tool for incremental archive, builds upon the zpaq work done before. Thanks to the dev for the multiple answers on encode dot su!