TAR¶
Tape Archive file
In short
A long standing, ubiquitous way of storing files and folders.
| item | info |
|---|---|
| types | Data (container) |
| preferred | ✅ yes |
| extensions | .tar |
| related formats | JSON, SQL, XML, YAML |
| wikipedia | Tar_(computing) |
Description¶
TAR is a container format, historically used to create tape archives from large directories, in order to remove it from the computer and store it away.
It is a transparent way to represent a directory and all of it contents, including subdirectories and their contents, in a single file.
By itself, it does not use compression nor encryption, although in practice its use is nearly always combined with (g)zip in order to economize on storage.