datahoarder
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.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
view the rest of the comments
You don't need to extract the whole thing if you use tar. The reason you have to here is because you use zstd/xz on top of it.
Use tar as is. It's what it's made for.
Tar has to scan the whole archive to find the file you want to extract. That's why it's slow. Compression doesn't really change that.
As for what tar is made for, that would be archiving directly to tape.