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Also known as: Parity Archive Volume Set 2, .par2
Parity Archive Volume Set 2, the recovery format posted alongside almost every binary release. It applies Reed-Solomon erasure coding to produce recovery blocks, commonly 5-15% of the release size, spread over files named .par2 and .volNNN+NN.par2. If missing or corrupt blocks number no more than the recovery blocks available, the set rebuilds exactly; beyond that, repair fails and the download is an incomplete.
Browse all terms in Binaries, Encoding & Repair, or see the full Usenet glossary.