Samiksha Jaiswal (Editor)

Xdelta

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Original author(s)
  
Joshua MacDonald

Development status
  
Active

Developer(s)
  
Joshua MacDonald

Written in
  
C

Initial release
  
October 12, 1997; 19 years ago (1997-10-12)

Stable release
  
3.0.11 / January 8, 2016; 14 months ago (2016-01-08)

xdelta is a command line program for delta encoding, which generates the difference between two files. This is similar to diff and patch, but it is targeted for binary files and does not generate human readable output.

It was first released in 1997. The developer of xdelta is Joshua MacDonald and the program is currently maintained by him. The algorithm of xdelta1 was based on the algorithm of rsync, which is developed by Andrew Tridgell, and using smaller block size than rsync.

Recent xdelta3 has some unique functions. It can generate standardized VCDIFF format, and it realized the compatibility among other delta encoding software which supports VCDIFF format. It runs on Unix-like operating systems and Microsoft Windows. xdelta can handle up to 264 bytes files in any platform, and it is suitable for large scale backup.

It seems the author has abandoned updating and developing the software. There have not been any bug fixes or updates to known serious problems in years, in particularly 2GB+ file support (64-bit hash function).

References

Xdelta Wikipedia