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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.

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Alternatives to tar for archiving Linux system? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by jmshrv@lemmy.world to c/datahoarder@lemmy.ml

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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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[–] what@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 year ago

Take a look at squashfs. This creates a compressed archive that can be mounted as a read-only filesystem to pull out individual files. It is very fast and likely already installed on your system.