compare archive formats

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  • Caspar

    (@friendlyghost)

    Hi ChipsC,

    generally speaking, Tar is the quickest of the formats you’ve mentioned, because it just packs, but doesn’t compress.

    Tar with GZip still is quickly packed, but the format is not very well supported to be unpacked under Windows, so Windows users might have to install additional software to unpack those archives.

    ZIP from all of the 3 takes the longest time to be packed and compressed, but it is very widely supported. If your aiming to quickly download and unpack, ZIP is your format of choice.

    For deeper insight into the details of Zip, Tar and Gzip these randomly picked google results might be interesting:
    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10540935/what-is-the-difference-between-tar-and-zip
    https://linux.derkeiler.com/Newsgroups/comp.os.linux.misc/2006-10/msg00826.html

    Cheers,
    Caspar

    Thread Starter ChipsC

    (@chipsc)

    Hi Caspar,

    Thanks for the clear explanation & informative links. My site is managed from a Mac & is hosted on a UNIX box with backups locally & to Dropbox. I am changing some archives from Zip to Tar GZip for maximum compression & speed (hopefully). Since Windows is not a factor, I hope this will be my best choice.

    Best,
    Chips

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