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I'm looking for a archiving program that adds redundancy to an archive.

Example : I've got 500MB of data, and a 700MB media to burn it. Rather than waste 200MB, I want to use them to add redundancy. Then if some data is damaged, the archiving program will be able to restore it because it were redundant.

Does such a program exists ? Which one would you recommend ? If possible, a FOSS software: if you don't have the archiver source code, you don't know if you'll be able to extract the archive in the future.

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Finally, I found parchive (V1 is obsolete, use par2), which is open-source and very efficient. It was originally used on Usenet : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive

It has options for percentage or target size (useful on a CD/DVD/BD-R):

-r<n>  Level of redundancy (percentage)
-r<c><n>  Redundancy target size, <c>=g(iga),m(ega),k(ilo) bytes

Edit: For optical media, dvdisaster can be more relevant.

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You can do it with rar. From the man page:

rr[N]  Add data  recovery  record.  Optionally, redundant information
       (recovery record) can be added to an archive.
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  • Not having used rar myself, would the user be able to specify "give me 200 MB of redundancy"? Commented Apr 16, 2020 at 11:26
  • rar is paid and proprietary software. Any FOSS alternative ? Commented Apr 16, 2020 at 12:15
  • @Kusalananda: it' percentage, but you could calculate what you need Commented Apr 16, 2020 at 12:17
  • @color2v: afaik it's not open source, but no pay-ware Commented Apr 16, 2020 at 12:18
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    @muaB: I think it's way safer to use free software for data archiving, you never know what the software will become in the future, and you can't keep the source code with the archive. Commented Apr 16, 2020 at 12:29

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