this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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datahoarder

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Who are we?

We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Alternatives to tar for archiving Linux system? (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by jmshrv@lemmy.world to c/datahoarder@lemmy.ml
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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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[–] cow@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

I use bupstash.io

[–] TheFrenchGhosty@lemmy.pussthecat.org 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

d

[–] Fryboyter@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 2 years ago

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.
[–] brechmos@lemmy.ca 0 points 2 years ago

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/tt

Extract a single file:

tar -xf ../pseudo.tgz pseudo/10481_2017.1069.png

You 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.