There seems to be quite some confusion about PAR files and Im struggling to find an answer to this.
I have several PAR files, each containing several GB of data. Considering PAR is a type of archive file (similar to tar I assume), I would like to extract its contents using linux. However, I cant seem to find how to do this. I can only find how to repair files or create a par file.
I am trying to use the par2 command line tool to do this.
Any help would be appreciated
TLDR: They're not really like .tar archives - they are generally created to support other files (including archives) to protect against data damage/loss. Without any of the original data, I think it is very unlikely any data can be recovered from these files.
.par files are (if they are genuinely PAR2 files) error recovery files for supporting a set of data stored separately. PAR files are useful, because they can protect the whole of the source data without needing a complete second copy.
For example, you might choose to protect 1GB of data using 100MB of .par files in the form of 10x 10MB files. This means that if any part of the original data (up to 100MB) is damaged or lost, it can be recalculated and repaired using the .par records.
This will still work if some of the .par files are lost, but the amount of data that can be recovered cannot exceed what .par files remain.
So...given that it is rare to create par files constituting 100% of the size of the original data, unless you have some of the original data as well, you probably won't be able to recover anything from the files.