Whenever I wipe my PC, I use tar to make an archive of the whole system. This works, but having to decompress the whole archive to pull files out is very annoying. Is there another archive format that:
- Preserves permissions (i.e., is Unix-y)
- Supports strong compression (I use either zstd or xz depending on how long I can be bothered to wait)
- Supports pulling out individual files quickly
You don’t need to extract the whole thing if you use tar. The reason you have to here is because you use zstd/xz on top of it.
Use tar as is. It’s what it’s made for.
Tar has to scan the whole archive to find the file you want to extract. That’s why it’s slow. Compression doesn’t really change that.
As for what tar is made for, that would be archiving directly to tape.