Remember ARJ? Yeah, warez d00ds first choice back in the good 'ol days before RAR grew strong.
The same company which created and still maintains ARJ, about the time when ARJ was falling from grace, created JAR which still seems to be a sort of ugly duckling.
JAR is a MS-DOS and WIN32 compatible, command line operated file archiver program. As of my knowledge, there is no GUI available for it. It's got almost all features ARJ has, which includes:
- long (FAT32, NTFS) filename support
- automated splitting (aka spanning) of the archive in aribitary lengths
- ANSI-style comments
However, it wouldn't be another (newer) program, if it wouldn't have an edge above ARJ:
- decent compression rates (similar to RAR or TAR/GZIP, small files are concatenated before compression, thus increasing compression rates)
- multiple backups of the same files, using incremental compression
- file version management
Compression rates of JAR usually even exceed RAR (a bit) while being significantly faster, however those are old numbers (RAR version 2.00 beta 3) and may have changed now. JAR compresses much better than PKZIP (ver. 2.04g), differences ranging from 15% up to 40%. On the downside, JAR is significantly slower than ZIP, especially with when used on a large number of files.
From my personal experience, I love JAR's ability to create multiple, versioned backups of the same file (-tree). Running once per day as a scheduled task, it is possible to fully restore any archived snapshot.
You can get an (almost) fully working shareware version from http://www.arjsoft.com. The shareware version only lacks the JAR security envelope, which resembles some sort of combined encryption and signation, but who needs that in days of PGP/GNUPG?
most information, especially compression rate comparisons, diabolically ripped from http://www.arjsoft.com/jar.htm