Alternatives to tar for archiving Linux system?
Alternatives to tar for archiving Linux system?
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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- mksquashfs - result can be mounted as a read only fs. Auto deduplication (Files with the same exact content occupy the same data block). Uses smaller block sizes for compression so ratios might not be as good
- fsarchiver - kind of like tar but indexes and stores fs info, and I'm pretty sure it allows picking specific files out
18 comments