Your files, on paper.

Pabaru backs up files and whole folders onto ordinary paper as a dense grid of dots — and brings them back from a scan. Free and open source, for Windows, macOS and Linux.

Pabaru backup window: a folder has been dropped in and three layouts — Compact, Balanced and Archival — are proposed with their page counts.

Why paper?

Hard drives fail, cloud accounts get closed, file formats and connectors go out of fashion. Good paper kept dry and dark lasts for decades. It needs no electricity, no account, no subscription and no particular piece of hardware — just a printer today and any scanner years from now. That makes it a good last line of defence for small but precious data: password-manager exports, encryption keys, 2FA recovery codes, contracts, notes, a family tree or a few small photos.

Pabaru — PAper BAckup in RUst — turns those files into printable pages and back again.

Features

Drag, drop, print

Drop files or whole folders into the app. Pabaru proposes three layouts — Compact, Balanced and Archival — with page count, dot density and resilience, and saves a print-ready PDF or PNG pages.

Survives real life

Two levels of error correction: Reed-Solomon inside every block and an erasure code across blocks and pages. Crumpled pages have been restored from real prints, torn pages can be scanned in pieces, and the Archival profile survives losing a whole page.

Scan any way you like

Restore from PNG, TIFF, JPEG or BMP scans or straight from a scanner’s PDF — in any order, any orientation, even from several copies of the same backup combined.

Private by design

Optional encryption with Argon2id and XChaCha20-Poly1305. The password is never printed. No file names appear on the printed pages, and original folder paths are never stored.

Modern, documented format

tar + zstd compression, a BLAKE3-hashed manifest that verifies every restored file, and an open specification that lets anyone write their own decoder.

App and command line

A desktop app (English and Czech) and a scriptable CLI on Windows, macOS and Linux, both built on the same Rust library. Dual-licensed MIT or Apache-2.0.

How it works

Back up. Pabaru packs your files into a compressed archive (optionally encrypted), splits it into small blocks, adds parity blocks and prints each block as a 40 × 40 grid of dots.
Store. Keep the pages somewhere safe — ideally more than one copy, in more than one place.
Restore. Scan the pages in any order and drop the scans into Pabaru. It finds the grid, corrects damaged dots, rebuilds missing blocks from parity and checks every file against its hash.

Pabaru restore window showing scanned pages, the number of blocks read and a quality map for each page. — Restoring from scans: progress, a quality map for each page and a password prompt for encrypted backups.

Your backups remain recoverable even without Pabaru

A backup is only as good as your ability to read it in twenty years. The Pabaru paper format is fully specified — page geometry, dot order, error correction, encryption and archive layout — so that a future programmer can recover the data from scans with nothing but the document and standard algorithms.

DownloadApps for Windows, macOS and Linux, plus the command-line tool.

Read the guideBack up, print, scan and restore — step by step.

SpecificationThe complete paper format, for independent decoders.

Source on GitHubCode, issues and releases.

Pabaru is inspired by PaperBack by Oleg Yuschuk, which pioneered printing data as dot grids. Many thanks to its author and to the projects that kept it alive.