Comment by adrian_b

For handling pax archives, I recommend the "libarchive" package, which is available in many Linux distributions, even if it originally comes from FreeBSD.

Among other utilities, it installs the "bsdtar" program, which you can use in your scripts like this:

  bsdtar --create --verbose --format=pax --file="${DIRECTORY}".pax "${DIRECTORY}" || exit

And for extraction:

  bsdtar --extract --preserve-permissions --verbose --file="${DIRECTORY}".pax

The bsdtar program has options for compressing and/or encrypting the archives, for the case when you do not want to use directly other external programs.

"par2create" creates multiple files from the (normally compressed and encrypted) archive file, for storing the added redundancy. I make a directory where I move those files, then I use a second time bsdtar (obviously without any compression or encryption) to aggregate those files in a single archive with redundancy.

The libarchive package can also be taken directly from:

https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive

"libarchive" handles correctly all kinds of file metadata, e.g. extended file attributes and high-resolution file timestamps, which not all archiving utilities do. Many Linux utilities, with the default command-line options or when they have not been compiled from their source with adequate compilation options, which happens in some Linux distributions, may silently lose some of the file metadata, when copying, moving or archiving.