The Simple Archive Format, or SAF, is a simple, lightweight, extendable file archive format designed by the Surface Automation Team. It has similar functionality to tar or cpio.

The only file archive format built into .NET is Zip, which cannot be read efficiently from a non-seekable stream (such as a network or crypto stream).

While SAF was designed to allow for efficient reading and writing from a non-seekable stream, it is more comparable to protobuf than tar – it’s something developers can use and build upon. Headers in an archive are application specific and can be customized per entry (all we define is the base structure; applications can freely extend the header type).

SAF can be compiled easily from source, and nuget.org packages are available (Microsoft.SurfaceAutomationTeam.SAF).

Note: SAF targets .NET Standard 2.1 - it cannot be used from .NET Framework 4.

If you aren't extending SAF, it can be used easily via the SAFArchive class. Here is a simple example of writing a directory to a SAF file:

using (var fs = new FileStream(archivePath, FileMode.Create))
{
  var archive = new SAFArchive(fs, SAFMode.Write, sourcePath, true);
  archive.WriteDirectoryToArchive();
}

And here is how you'd read that same archive to extract the contents:

using (var fs = new FileStream(archivePath, FileMode.Open))
{
  var archive = new SAFArchive(fs, SAFMode.Read, extractPath);
  archive.ReadAllEntriesToDisk();
}

You can use other functions to seek through the record for specific files, or to control extraction parameters. In the default configuration, SAF also calculates MD5 checksums for all files written to the archive, and verifies them on extraction.

SAF is designed to be minimal. There is a one-line file header at the beginning of the archive ('SAF1' followed by a newline), then each entry in the archive only has three components:

• The header size (represented as a UTF-8 string of digits, followed by a newline)
• The header (a json object, as a set of UTF-8 bytes)
• The payload (the file contents, or nothing for a directory)

The header is flexible, and can contain as many or as few fields as required by the application. While we provide a basic header in the library that is used by the high level SAFArchive class, users who want to customize the format can use their own header types.

In its default configuration, when used with the included SAFArchive class, the format keeps the following metadata

• Name of entry
• Size of entry (in bytes)
• MD5 Hash of entry (for files only)
• Last Write Time
• Entry Type (file or directory)

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