AFA (file format)
In computing, AFA is a proprietary archive file format that supports data compression, error recovery, data encryption and file spanning. It was developed by a Spanish software engineer, Vicente (hence the name AFA: Astrotite Format Archiver ), and is currently licensed by Fantiusen Software.
The filename extension used by AFA is .afa for the data volume set. If a AFA-archive is broken into many smaller files (a "multi-volume archive"), then the smaller files use the extensions .0001.afa, .0002.afa, .0003.afa etc.
Software
AFA files May Be created only with commercial software astrotite. The Astrotite EULA (End user license agreement) is embedded in installation files -.
Astrotite
Astrotite is commercial software (Free for not-commercial use) available for Microsoft Windows and Linux. It is the only graphical tool that can write modern AFA files.
Vicente created the AFA file format and developed programs for packing and unpacking AFA files (.ast2 format), originally for Microsoft Windows which were later ported to other platforms in the Astrotite version 200X. The main Windows version of the archiver, known as Astrotite, is distributed as free for users, requiring payment for company, schools, etc. Others versions of this program are also available for GNU/Linux, and FreeBSD.
Comparison to other compression algorithms
AFA compression and decompression operations are claimed to be faster than compressing and decompressing the same data with others compression algorithms like ZIP or RAR. This has not been verified.
For further reading see Compression comparison.
Internet media type
Astrotite for Linux lists the default Internet media type for AFA files as application/x-astrotite-afa.
See also
- List of archive formats
- Comparison of file archivers
External links
es:Formato de compresión AFA ja:AFA (ファイルフォーマット)