This is similar to diff and patch, except diff computes and shows the difference between two complete files, while patch is primarily designed for human-readable text files; Xdelta is designed for binary files and does not generate human readable output.

Xdelta was first released sometime before October 12, 1997[4] by Joshua MacDonald, who currently maintains the program.

[citation needed] Xdelta version 3 is primarily designed to work with streams following the standardized VCDIFF format, and it realized the compatibility among other delta encoding software which supports the VCDIFF format.

[citation needed] It runs on Unix-like operating systems and Microsoft Windows.

xdelta can handle up to 264 byte files,[5][failed verification] and it is suitable for large backups.