How to archive and compress files and folders in the terminal?

Archive management and data compression are daily tasks for system administrators and developers. In the Linux ecosystem, there is a historical division of labor: the tar utility is responsible for combining multiple files into a single archive, and specialized compression programs reduce its physical size.

The de facto classic standard is the combination of tar and gzip, which allows you to pack entire directories with all subfolders while preserving the permission structure. Modern alternatives like bzip2 and xz provide a higher compression ratio at the cost of increased processing time and RAM consumption.

For quick work with the most popular archive formats, the following approaches are used:

When working with large amounts of data, it is critically important to be able to verify the integrity of created archives before moving them or deleting the originals. Most modern compression utilities have built-in mechanisms for testing archives without actually unpacking them to disk.

It is also worth mentioning advanced next-generation utilities like zstd, which provide unprecedented compression and decompression speeds with excellent data size reduction ratios. They are actively being implemented in modern distributions to optimize backups.