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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Maybe Borg is a possibility. However, I have not yet backed up an entire system with it, but only certain files.
- The file permissions have always been correct when restoring files in my case.
- Which compression (LZ4, zlib, LZMA or zstd) and which compression level is used can be specified when creating a backup.
- Backups can be mounted via FUSE, so that you can restore individual files with an file manager or a terminal emulator, for example.
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.
At least on the Mac (bsdtar) you can extract single files out of a tar file.
E.g.,
Create the tar file:
tar cvzf pseudo.tgz pseudo/Move to another directory
cd /tmp/ttExtract a single file:
tar -xf ../pseudo.tgz pseudo/10481_2017.1069.pngYou say PC, so might want to check the tar version you are using and see if there are extra parameters to do the file extraction.
You can pull a single file as you mention, but your computer still has to decompress everything inside the tar file up until the file you want to extract, which can take a very long time for medium to large archives.
Take a look at DAR: http://dar.linux.free.fr/
It has many advanced functions and is actively developed (for over a decade).
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.
Borg or restic since they do deduplication.
My biggest data regret is rsync-ing or tar-ing up my systems to my fileserver as a backup mechanism. So much wasted space. Extremely difficult to find anything. Impossible to properly organize. These backup solutions improve the situation tremendously.
When I wipe my PC I always use Clonezilla. I have a separate
/homepartition and I usually copy/etcinside my user’s home directory just before the cloning. I’d say you should give it a try.Dar
Tar = Tape ARchive
DAR = Disk Archive
It is supposed to replace tar when storing on random access media as tar isn’t random access. Compression and encryption options.
I use bupstash.io
