Dar is a shell command that makes backup of a directory tree and files. Its features include splitting archives over several files, DVD, CD, ZIP, or floppies, compression, full or differential backups, strong encryption, proper saving and restoration of hard links, extended attributes, file forks, Door inodes, and sparse files, remote backup using pipes and external commands (such as ssh), and rearrangement of the "slices" of an existing archive. It can run commands between slices, before and after saving some defined files or directories (for a proper database backup, for example), and quickly retrieve individual files from differential and full backups. Several external GUIs exist as alternatives to its CLI interface, like kdar, DarGUI, SaraB, etc.