Oblig. XKCD:

Zip makes different tradeoffs. Its compression is basically the same as gz, but you wouldn't know it from the file sizes.

Tar archives everything together, then compresses. The advantage is that there are more patterns available across all the files, so it can be compressed a lot more.

Zip compresses individual files, then archives. The individual files aren't going to be compressed as much because they aren't handling patterns between files. The advantages are that an error early in the file won't propagate to all the other files after it, and you can read a file in the middle without decompressing everything before it.

Obligatory shilling for unar, I love that little fucker so much

• Single command to handle uncompressing nearly all formats.
• No obscure flags to remember, just unar <yourfile>
• Makes sure output is always contained in a directory
• Correctly handles weird japanese zip files with SHIFT-JIS filename encoding, even when standard unzip doesn't

Where .7z at

.tar.xz

cool people use zst

(actually decreases decompression time by 1300%)

When I'm feeling cool and downloading a *.tar* file, I'll wget to stdout, and tar from stdin. Archive gets extracted on the fly.

I have (successfully!) written an .iso to CD this way, too (pipe wget to cdrecord). Fun stuff.

.tar.gz, or .tgz if I'm in a hurry

Where's .7z people?

Can someone explain why MacOS always seems to create _MACOSX folders in zips that we Linux/Windows users always delete anyway?

.tar.7z gang (probably not a good idea)

I use .tar.gz in personal backups because it's built in, and because its the command I could get custom subdirectory exclusion to work on.

I'm the weird one in the room. I've been using 7z for the last 10-15 years and now .tar.zst, after finding out that ZStandard achieves higher compression than 7-Zip, even with 7-Zip in "best" mode, LZMA version 1, huge dictionary sizes and whatnot.

zstd --ultra -M99000 -22 files.tar -o files.tar.zst

.fitgirlrepack

Me removing the plastic case of a 2.5' sata ssd to make it physically smaller

Mf’ers act like they forgot about zstandatd

7z gang joined the chat.....

I mean xz/7z has kind of been the way for at least a decade now

.tar.gz

Can we please just never use proprietary rar ever. We have 7z, tar.gz, and the classic zip

ZSTD FTW

all the cool kids use .cab

I use the command line every day, but can't be bothered with all the compression options of tar and company.

zip -r thing.zip things/ and unzip thing.zip are temptingly more straightforward.

Need more compression? zip -r -9 thing.zip things/. Need a faster option? Use a smaller digit.