par2cmdline VS 7-Zip-zstd

An alternative is including PAR2 files.

Not only that but if you budget for an expected error rate of let's say 10% you can use par2 to create additional files that add that redundancy to your archives.

https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline

That's the same reason I do archive files. For parity I personally use (https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline) which does create extra files, so I can see how WinRAR would have something to add there.

Here's the first example I could find.

https://pthree.org/2014/04/01/protect-against-bit-rot-with-p...

Basically, you take a normal TAR file and creates external parity files that can be used to recover data in the case of bitrot. Something like this would have been great to have on a few data files I had to retrieve from tape that ended up with a bit flip somewhere in the network > disk > tape > disk process.

However, it doesn't look like the program is maintained anymore...

http://parchive.sourceforge.net/

> DISCLAIMER: This project web space is not actively mantained and is presented here for archive purposes. However some project members still montior the project mailings lists if you have questions. (sic)

The last release was in 2004 (Wikipedia says it was active until 2015, but I don't see that).

Check out par2. I don't know personally of an open source one except I used QuickPar for Windows in the distant past. There's also multipar: https://github.com/Yutaka-Sawada/MultiPar and parchive: https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline

Do you consider rar a standard? It's a pretty good format, even though there aren't any good open-source implementations. But if you're willing to pay for your software, WinRAR command line versions are available for most platforms.

7zip is the most obvious free alternative. There is also a 7zip fork that offers zstd [1]. The command line experience for 7zip isn't very good however.

1: https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

Check out https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

There's also this fork which supports additional compressions: https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

7-zip is actually not a bad option, but I'd strongly advise using the fast-lzma2 codec, because, well, it is waay faster, and might even give you better ratios, depending on how you use it. You can find an implementation here, and it is compatible with traditional 7-zip (you can decompress it on any computer with any newish version of 7z)

Hi, PeaZip can use McMilk's additional compression codecs for 7z format (Zstandard, Brotli, Lizard, etc), https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

You can extract the files yourself with 7Zip. You can install 7Zip from here and then install this plugin to extract ZStandard files, or you can directly install the modified 7Zip with the plugin already from that plugin page. Then simply open the zst file you downloaded with 7Zip and extract it.