Use zip not tar.gz. I just lost 2GBs of data because the archive was corrupted out of nowhere :')
Only then do I find out that if a zip file id corrupted the damage is only done to one compressed file unlike tar where the damage affects everything after it.
Tar is just concatenated data so that an entire file structure can be written to tape. This means that your archive is recoverable provided that it gunzips fine.
I’ve used tar.gz for decades, and never had any dataloss because of it. Honestly, I think your issue is down to operator error, I’m afraid.
This archive was a backup :/ I was trying to restore the original after making some bad changes.
The actual actual lesson I should have learned is wait for the full archive backup to extract successfully before deleting the original and declaring the restoration done.
Still I will always have a (maybe irrational) fear of tar.gz now.
Use zip not tar.gz. I just lost 2GBs of data because the archive was corrupted out of nowhere :')
Only then do I find out that if a zip file id corrupted the damage is only done to one compressed file unlike tar where the damage affects everything after it.
Tar is just concatenated data so that an entire file structure can be written to tape. This means that your archive is recoverable provided that it gunzips fine.
I’ve used tar.gz for decades, and never had any dataloss because of it. Honestly, I think your issue is down to operator error, I’m afraid.
In case it isn’t obvious to readers, “tar” is literally shortened from “Tape ARchive”.
I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know much about how either works. I got my info from this answer
This seems to be correct.
But a downside of this is that zip archives will be larger, possibly much larger, since there is no compression across files.
The actual lesson you should have learned was to use backups. If data isn’t backed up then you might as well pretend you don’t have it.
This archive was a backup :/ I was trying to restore the original after making some bad changes.
The actual actual lesson I should have learned is wait for the full archive backup to extract successfully before deleting the original and declaring the restoration done.
Still I will always have a (maybe irrational) fear of tar.gz now.