this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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datahoarder

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Who are we?

We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.

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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
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

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.