afio (archiver and backup program with internal compression support) Afio makes compressed archives that are safer than compressed tar or cpio archives, allowing better handling of input data corruption. Afio also supports multi-volume archives during interactive operation. Afio makes cpio archives with ASCII-formatted header information (odc). Where the odc format cannot represent some files and file properties that could be present on a modern UNIX filesystem, it uses an afio- specific 'large ASCII' header for the files concerned.