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
I tend to make full images of the disk with dd then mount them with kpartx and mount. This results in terabytes of disk images but I use ZFS compression and have plenty of space. It preserves everything about every file since it saves the fs itself and any deleted files that could be recovered with photorec etc.