This is the first that I've heard of ChaCha for encryption (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salsa20#ChaCha_variant" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salsa20#ChaCha_variant</a>).<p>Apparently it's a standard that Google is pushing to replace RC4 and already is using for HTTPS between google.com and Android.<p>If arc catches on I'm curious if it could support inline operations. E.g. on a 100gb+ archive can I read the tar index without decrypting the entire archive first, can I extract a single file? The ChaCha algorithm is a <i>streaming cipher</i>, which as I understand suggests that I cannot do operations like that.<p>Even worse now that I'm thinking about this, if my archive has a bit error early in the file does that mean the entire archive cannot be decrypted. Maybe for long term storage I'm better off physically securing my archives than encrypting them to avoid bit rot ruining everything.
Cool! I usually use gpg-zip for this purpose on machines where I have gpg installed.<p><pre><code> gpg-zip --symmetric --gpg-args --cipher-algo=AES256 --output backup.tar.gpg file1 file2 file3</code></pre>
This seems counter to the "unix philosophy". I would expect to use an archiving tool piped into an encryption tool. I'm not sure of the utility of something that combines the two.
Can anyone tell me what advantage tgz has over zip? I usually curse when I have to use it, because it lacks indexes and is pretty much only good for archival tapes, if that. I wish we'd all move to a more modern format, like zip or 7zip.
It's not clear from the README ... is this a client/server app, wherein I need to have 'arc' living on the server side ?<p>Or can I just point arc to SSH/SFTP and the server can be "dumb" ?
The name arc has namespace collision problems. Not in software in general (I never complained about somebody calling their language elm - that's Cantrill's job), but in archivers in particular. Arc was the format that directly preceded zip, pkzip being the program that pk started selling after it was discovered that pkarc's source code was copied verbatim from the source for the original arc utility.