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It doesn't make sense to wrap modern data in a 1979 format, introducing .ptar
- compressedgas 1y agoSo another WIM like format?
- mrflop 1y agoNot exactly, if WIM is a complete snapshot of a Windows disk ready to be restored on an identical machine, .ptar is a self-contained capsule holding successive, encrypted, deduplicated, and verifiable versions of any dataset, portable and usable across different environments.
- Bowes-Lyon 1y agoGreat work! What I feel skeptical about, is the fact that plakar is not self-contained, but has a dependency. That gives me a pause. What I’d love to see is one single binary that I can just install and use.
- poolpOrg 1y agoAuthor here, plakar is a single binary, unsure I understand what it is you’d prefer, a ptar specific executable?
- Bowes-Lyon 1y agoThanks for replying. Maybe I misunderstood something. The way I saw it, I can not use plakar without having to install Go first (the dependency). And that bothers me a bit. Let me explain my reasoning. Suppose I made an .ptar archive today, put it on a USB stick, threw that in a vault and forgot about it. Ten years down the road I want to restore that archive. But the .ptar file alone is useless without the plakar tool. So I have to install plakar first. Ideally plakar should sit on that USB stick, right next to the archive, ready to be installed. But plakar is dependent on Go, so I have to hunt Go first. And who knows what the state of Go will be ten years down the road. The .ptar file that I made today may end up unusable ten years later, because Go evolved in some unpredictable way.
- poolpOrg 1y agooh, that's not meant to stay that way. first, we're going to release pre-built binaries for various platforms with our next stable release which will remove the need to install a go runtime as you'll have a standalone native executable for plakar / ptar. then, the format is open and we'll publish a friendlier documentation should someone want to implement their own builder/reader. finally, it's likely we'll publish a library + standalone executable in C, so that people can easily implement a binding to their favourite language and/or have a small executable in a language that traverses the decades :-)
- Bowes-Lyon 1y ago> a standalone native executable for plakar / ptar. Great, that is exactly what I was missing! Thank you for your great work.
- crsc 1y agoA truly fascinating article. Welcome to the 21st century. :-)
- nanark 1y agoGreat content!
- poolpOrg 1y agoThx
- johng 1y agoThis is really neat... plakar itself looks like an awesome backup tool. We use Borg now but I'll be testing this out.