Here’s the Deal
Slant is powered by a community that helps you make informed decisions. Tell us what you’re passionate about to get your personalized feed and help others.
When comparing .tar vs .7z, the Slant community recommends .7z for most people. In the question“What are the best archive file formats?” .7z is ranked 1st while .tar is ranked 2nd.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Common Questions
Pros
Pro The defacto file packager compression built in
Known everywhere and allows options to compress. Unix/Linux tools peer inside without unwrapping the file, example is 'less'.
Lack of knowledge on tar shows level of newbieness and computing competence.
Pro Wraps files up without any compression so you can choose your own tool to compress a "solid" file
The alternative is to compress each file individually and shove it in the archive. This prevents your compression engine from taking advantage of similarities between files, but allows you to extract undamaged files from a damaged archive.