Couple of questions regarding dar

Hello,

first off all thank you for providing 'dar'. Awesome program!
I want to use 'dar' for tape backups and since i am new to 'dar' i got a
couple of questions:

1) Is it true that 'dar' don't care about a trailing slash with '--fs-root'?
For e.g.
dar ... --fs-root /home/user1
vs
dar ... --fs-root /home/user1/
I would assume that without the trailing slash 'dar' uses the folder
"user1" as first/root folder to save, but thats not the case.
Instead all subfolders within 'user1' are saved.

2) For writing to tape i want to use a buffer. Am i right that 'dar'
doesn't provide a buffer?
Can I use mbuffer for it? Is anything bad with this command?

dar --create - <..other options..> --fs-root /home/user1 | mbuffer -P 80 -m
2G -R 140M | dar_split split_output /dev/nst0

3) To encrypt my tape backups I currently use:
--key aes256:PasswordInPainText
I don't like writing the password in plain text. To automate the backup a
manual input is not an option.
Can 'dar' read the password from file?

4) Whats the progress of implementing lz4 and/or zstd?
Bot have significant performance advantages over the existing compression
algorithms so IMO one of them would be really nice.
If you my have already started to implement them ('cause i saw that there
are already feature requests), do you already have some comparative values
/ benchmarks ?

5a) I am using -C .. -A .. to create differential backups and append them
to the end of the tape.
This is maybe a dump question, but how can i find the right differential
backup when restoring a folder/file?
For e.g.: I list all files via 'dar --list' from the last differential
backup and obviously most of the files are not marked as "saved"
because they were stored in an earlier differential backup and even in last
full backup. Is there a built-in concept or easy instruction to identify
the right earlier (differential/full) backup where the files are actually
stored?

5b) As an extension to question 5a): I am using 'dar_split' to write to
multiple tapes, do i have to pay attention to something special when
restoring/listing a folder/file in combination with differential backups?

Much thanks for your input/help

Nils

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