It doesn't make sense to wrap modern data in a 1979 format, introducing .ptar
plakar.ioGreat 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.
Author here, plakar is a single binary, unsure I understand what it is you’d prefer, a ptar specific executable?
Thanks 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.
oh, 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 :-)
> a standalone native executable for plakar / ptar.
Great, that is exactly what I was missing! Thank you for your great work.
This is really neat... plakar itself looks like an awesome backup tool. We use Borg now but I'll be testing this out.
Great content!
Thx
A truly fascinating article. Welcome to the 21st century. :-)
So another WIM like format?
Not 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.