• lemmyvore
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      7 months ago

      Zip, RAR, 7z etc. store and compress the files. Tarballs work differently, tar stores the files and the second program compresses the tar as a continuous stream.

      They originated in different mediums, programs like zip were born to deal with folder structures, tar was created to deal with linear tape archives (hence the name).

    • palordrolap
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      97 months ago

      Kind of redundant. Both .zip and .rar store an index of files within the archive and are a bit ‘inside-out’ when it comes what we get from tar.gz.

      That is, ZIP is pretty close to what you’d get if you first gzipped all your files and then put them into a .tar.

      RAR does a little more (if I remember correctly), such as generating a dictionary of common redundancies between files and then uses that knowledge to compress the files individually, but better. Something akin to a .tar file is still the result though.