The idea behind this project is to provide a tool to apply the data-
recovery capability concepts of RAID-like systems to the posting and
recovery of multi-part archives on Usenet. With a parity archive, this
tool, and all but one part of a multi-part set you can recover the
missing part.

The key to this mission is a clean file format specification which
provides all the necessary capabilities for programs to easily verify
and regenerate single missing parts out of a set of archives.

We might just be able to make binary posting and downloading on Usenet a
little easier. That's a pretty cool goal!

par2 is complete rewrite of parchive with much additional advantages.
Read all about them on this page:
http://www.pbclements.co.uk/QuickPar/AboutPAR2.htm

Tip of the day: alias par='par2 r *.((p|P)??|par2)'