I am looking for a good format for archiving entire file systems of old Linux computers.
TAR.GZ
The tar.gz format is great for archiving files with UNIX style attributes, but since compression is applied throughout the archive, the design eliminates accidental access. Instead, if you want to access the file at the end of the archive, you need to start from the beginning and unzip the entire file (which can be several hundred GB) to the point where you find the record you are looking for.
ZIP
And vice versa, one point of sale of the ZIP format is that it stores the archive index: file names are stored separately with pointers to a location in the archive to find data. If I want to extract the file at the end, I look at the position of this file by name, look for a place and extract the data. However, it does not preserve file attributes such as ownership, permissions, symbolic links, etc.
Other options?
I tried using squashfs , but it is not intended for this purpose. The file format is incompatible between versions, and creating an archive requires a lot of time and space.
What other options might be better suited to this goal?
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