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.