![]() The disadvantages of these formats include less compatibility with Windows and the (potential) need to uncompress the entire archive to extract a single file. The choice between gzip and bzip2 to compress the tar archive is mainly a decision about speed versus compression ratio, with bzip2 delivering smaller files but with a much slower compression speed. ![]() tar format has full support for Unix permissions and other platform-specific properties. tar.gz and tar.bz2 archives are ideal for use on Linux systems (and by extension for sharing files with Linux users) because the tar, gzip and bzip2 tools are largely ubiquitous on the platform, and because the. There are de-compressors for Linux and Mac OS X (although not GUI based as standard).Īs others have mentioned, the choice of a particular compression format is heavily dependent on the use and the intended audience. My personal choice is 7-Zip, as it has great and flexible compression despite it having a peculiar user interface on Windows. Generally speaking ZIP is the most ubiquitous format, but sizes over 4 GB aren't generally supported (if at all), security support is generally regarded as poor (the standard password can be compromised with a plain-text attack, and further encryption is generally implemented as an unofficial derivative of the format by commercial ZIP software vendors).Īpart from that, most other popular formats will have some form of support on all operating systems by installing more software. File system attributes - Does the compressor store relevant file system metadata and permissions that may be worth preserving at point of extraction?.Generally speaking a Windows self-extractor will not work on Linux by default, unless run through a compatibility layer like Wine). Self-extraction support - Can the archive be rolled into an executable file that provides ease of use to whomever needs to use it? (Also bear in mind you can only create a self-extractor for a single platform.System Requirements - Modern compressors such as 7-Zip do offer the ability to increase compression efficiency by using a larger dictionary (a dictionary is a reference of commonly repeated data in a compressed file), but this in turn increases memory consumption at both compression and decompression time.Unicode support - Does the archiver support international file names or just standard ASCII?.Repairing and recovery - If the file becomes partially corrupt, does it offer a recovery record to aid restoration of data?. ![]() Multiple volumes support - If the target medium requires the file to be split into appropriate chunks, does the format support this elegantly.Password protection and/or encryption - Are these security measures required?. ![]()
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