Zip makes different tradeoffs. Its compression is basically the same as gz, but you wouldn't know it from the file sizes.
Tar archives everything together, then compresses. The advantage is that there are more patterns available across all the files, so it can be compressed a lot more.
Zip compresses individual files, then archives. The individual files aren't going to be compressed as much because they aren't handling patterns between files. The advantages are that an error early in the file won't propagate to all the other files after it, and you can read a file in the middle without decompressing everything before it.
Obligatory shilling for unar, I love that little fucker so much
- Single command to handle uncompressing nearly all formats.
- No obscure flags to remember, just
unar <yourfile> - Makes sure output is always contained in a directory
- Correctly handles weird japanese zip files with SHIFT-JIS filename encoding, even when standard
unzipdoesn't
cool people use zst
.fitgirlrepack
I use .tar.gz in personal backups because it's built in, and because its the command I could get custom subdirectory exclusion to work on.
I'm the weird one in the room. I've been using 7z for the last 10-15 years and now
.tar.zst, after finding out that ZStandard achieves higher compression than 7-Zip, even with 7-Zip in "best" mode, LZMA version 1, huge dictionary sizes and whatnot.zstd --ultra -M99000 -22 files.tar -o files.tar.zst7z gang joined the chat.....
Mf’ers act like they forgot about zstandatd
.tar.gz
Can we please just never use proprietary rar ever. We have 7z, tar.gz, and the classic zip
all the cool kids use .cab
That's fine. I'm use to being unrepresented in the arj, lha, and uc2 crew
one of the cool things about tar is that it's hard link aware
.tar.xz
☠️
I'm a 7z person.
Good ol -xvjpf
.txz, I'm too lazy to type the full nameI'm from
tar.gz.gpggang to keep away nasty storage providers.tar.zst forever
This guy tar balls
Bzip2 compression is often surprisingly good with text files, especially log files. It seems to "see" redundancies there - and logs often have a lot of it - far better than gzip and sometimes even lzma.
Anyway, if I saw a bunch of
tar.bz2files, that's what I'd expect to find in them.i just use either zip or tar+gzip. personally, i avoid rar as it's a proprietary format.
so silly loll
I unironically used xz for a long time. It was just eazy and all around very good compress. A close second is 7zip because I used it on windows for years.
.zlibI still wonder what that's like. Somebody must still occasionally get a notification that SOMEWHERE somebody paid for their WinRAR license and is like "WOAH WE GOT ANOTHER ONE!"
Never looked back since 7z though. :D
ZPAQ is for cool people with massive space savings
Make the stage 4 tarball
I’m in this picture and I resent it.
Compatibility aside, I'd say that
.tar.pxzaka.tpxzis probably my vote.LZMA is probably what I'd want to use.
xzand7zipuse that. It's a bit slow to compress, but it has good compression ratios, and it's faster to decompress than bzip2.pixzpermits for parallel LZMA compression/decompression. On present-day processors with a lot of cores, that's desirable.It also can use .tar as its container format, which is desirable; that's everywhere.
The major drawback to .tar is that it doesn't support indexed access, so extracting a single file isn't fast, but .tar.pxz does.
What the fuck is that file extension?
Im a pirate, I am rar like, roawr, lol
?
