In contemplating backing up online, decided to get a little fancy and considered using PAR files.

Well, PAR's are about the most FRUSTRATING thing I have come across in linux to date. Before I just went ahead and did it, I wanted to learn about them of course.

Well with par-cmdline and par2-cmdline, I can make them, I can check them, I can repair them, I can almost get them to make me coffee in the morning, but I can NOT put them back together!!!! And as far as I have found, no one on the net wants to share this info.
Do I have resort to a windows emulator and run a windows par program?(the only thing I haven't tried)

I hope this doesn't persuade someone not to give me an answer, but I am contemplating not using PAR's just for the aggravation factor.

Anyone here know how to put PAR files back together?

thanks in advance - tw

p.s. - slackware 10 rocks!! I've had great luck and fun with it.

You are probably running into problem because you use PAR NOT for their purpose.

PARs are designed as a repair mechanism, not as storage medium. Usually, they are "parity" pieces, used to repair broken archives. So the wording usually is to "apply, or restore something else" rather than put them together. Example:
- Make 3 RARs 1gig each, and make 1gig worth of PARs.
- Erase any one RAR, and use the PAR set to restore one 1gig RAR.

(Technically it is possible to to make 3gigs of PAR and recreate all of RARs, or a folder, but it is not effective. I believe PAR does not know how to compress, just how to diversify risk)

You are better off using tar.gz, or, RAR if you need easy splitting into parts.

The above post explains this great - I guess if you want to understand more stuff about parity files, search on newsgroup help sites for an explanation. Once you get the idea, you can use QuickPar - it's a windows program but runs (at least for me) great under wine, and is very good ;) - nice easy to use GUI!

Good luck

Steve