Afio manipulates groups of files, copying them within or between filesystems and an afio archive.

Afio archives are portable as they contain only ASCII-formatted header information. Afio makes cpio-format archives. Afio deals somewhat gracefully with input data corruption. Afio supports multi-volume archives during interactive operation. Afio can make compressed archives that are much safer than compressed tar or cpio archives.

Afio is best used as an `archive engine' in a backup script.