99.9% of the time, if a .tar.gz archive is corrupted, I don't want to recover the data - I want to redownload it from a different mirror because it's source code and it probably won't work with any corruption at all.
Sometimes you have no choice. Downloading historic archives of which there is no other copy, trying to recover of it as much as possible.
Two reasons:
- if you know tar supports your directory / metadata, you don't have to lookup if zst will preserve that info
- interfile compression
I don't think people would say they use tar because it's a stream format. They use it because it packages files/directories into a file
I only use it for keeping file permissions
Re:7-Zip for Linux
by evil-olive on Thursday March 11, 2021 @09:54PM
(#26431770)
In the common case of receiving a compressed tar over the network, it should hopefully be protected by at least a checksum or hash, if not a cryptographic signature.
If I expect I may have to deal with some form of data corruption (such as long-term archival media), I'd rather add a layer such as PAR2 [0]. Rather than content myself with "if the tar file is corrupted, I can probably recover most of the contents", erasure coding gives me confidence that I can definitely recover all of the contents, with confidence they're not corrupted, as long as I have enough parity data.
The algorithms that can recover data after the corruption like bzip2 and lzip don’t see much use these days