صيغة حزم دبيان مصممة بحيث يمكن استخراج محتوياتها على أي نظام يونكس يملك الأوامر الكلاسيكية ar، و tar، و gzip (وأحياناً xz أو bzip2). هذه الخاصية التافهة ظاهريًا حاسمة بالنسبة لقابلية النقل والإنقاذ في حالات الكوارث.
		
			Imagine, for example, that you mistakenly deleted the 
dpkg program, and that you could thus no longer install Debian packages. 
dpkg being a Debian package itself, it would seem your system would be done for... Fortunately, you know the format of a package and can therefore 
download the 
.deb file of the 
dpkg package and install it manually (see sidebar 
أدوات dpkg ،APT و ar). If by some misfortune one or more of the programs 
ar, 
tar or 
gzip/
xz/
bzip2 have disappeared, you will only need to copy the missing program from another system (since each of these operates in a completely autonomous manner, without dependencies, a simple copy will suffice). If your system suffered some even more outrageous fortune, and even these don't work (maybe the deepest system libraries are missing?), you should try the static version of 
busybox (provided in the 
busybox-static package), which is even more self-contained, and provides subcommands such as 
busybox ar, 
busybox tar and 
busybox xz.