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
Take a look at squashfs. This creates a compressed archive that can be mounted as a read-only filesystem to pull out individual files. It is very fast and likely already installed on your system.