Safetar - Secure Archiver with Integrity Check

Safetar is a high-performance Bash utility for creating compressed archives with built-in integrity verification. It leverages parallel compression and provides multiple verification modes to ensure data integrity.

✨ Features

• 🚀 Fast Parallel Compression: Uses pigz for multi-threaded gzip compression
• 📊 Real-time Progress: Visual progress bars for compression and verification
• ✅ Integrity Verification: Two verification modes:
  • Quick Check: Fast gzip test for basic validation
  • Paranoid Mode: Byte-by-byte diff comparison for maximum safety
• 🎨 Beautiful CLI: Colored output with ASCII art and formatted boxes
• 🔄 Smart Overwrite Protection: Prompts before overwriting existing archives
• 🖥️ Cross-Platform: Works on macOS and Linux

📋 Requirements

The following dependencies are required:

• pigz - Parallel implementation of gzip
• pv - Pipe Viewer for progress monitoring
• gtar - GNU tar (on macOS, BSD tar on Linux)

🚀 Installation

1. Clone the repository:

git clone <repository-url>
cd Safetar

2. Make the script executable:

chmod +x src/safetar

3. Optionally, symlink to your PATH:

ln -s "$(pwd)/src/safetar" /usr/local/bin/safetar

4. Install dependencies (macOS):

brew install pigz pv gnu-tar

📖 Usage

Basic Syntax

safetar <folder> [options]

Options

Option	Description
-c, --check	Perform quick integrity check after compression
-p, --paranoid	Perform thorough byte-by-byte verification
-f, --force	Overwrite existing archive without prompt
-h, --help	Display help message

Examples

Standard compression:

safetar my-folder

With quick integrity check:

safetar my-folder --check

With paranoid verification:

safetar my-folder --paranoid

Force overwrite:

safetar my-folder --force

🎯 Verification Modes

Standard Mode

Creates a compressed .tar.gz archive without verification. Fast and suitable when integrity checking is not critical.

Quick Check Mode (--check)

After compression, performs a gzip test to verify the archive can be decompressed. Quick validation of archive integrity.

Paranoid Mode (--paranoid)

Performs a complete byte-by-byte comparison between the source folder and the decompressed archive content. Ensures absolute data integrity but takes longer.

🔧 How It Works

1. Source Analysis: Calculates folder size for progress tracking
2. Compression: Uses tar + pigz -9 for maximum compression with parallel processing
3. Progress Display: Real-time progress bar shows compression status
4. Verification (optional): Tests archive integrity based on selected mode
5. Result: Outputs .tar.gz file in current directory

🎨 Output Example

┌────────────────────────────────────┐
│   SAFETAR Secure Archiver          │
├────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Output : my-folder.tar.gz          │
│ Mode   : Paranoid (Diff)           │
└────────────────────────────────────┘

Compressing :  ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 100%
Verifying   :  ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 100%

✔ Archive created successfully.

📊 Performance

Safetar uses parallel compression via pigz, which can significantly speed up compression on multi-core systems. The number of threads is automatically detected based on your CPU.

⚠️ Notes

• Archives are created in the current working directory
• The script automatically handles macOS (uses gtar) and Linux (uses tar)
• Progress updates occur every 0.1 seconds for smooth display
• Paranoid mode requires more time but guarantees data integrity

🛠️ Technical Details

• Version: 1.0.0
• Author: Quentin Lamamy
• Date: 2026-01-06
• Language: Bash
• Compression: tar + pigz (gzip level 9)

📝 License

See LICENSE file for details.

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open issues or submit pull requests.