datahoarder

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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? (self.datahoarder)

submitted 1 year ago by jmshrv to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] dbrand666 1 points 1 year ago

Look at Restic too. Similar feature set. Really simple to set up (I think Borg is too but I haven't tried it).