“The reliable old Linux/Unix archiving standbys are still
relevant to the contemporary Linux server admin; they are fast,
reliable, flexible, and script-able tar“tar has been around approximately forever. It wraps up a set of
files into one single larger achive (making them easier to share
with other people), but it does no compression, so it doesn’t save
space. The tar command does, however, support command-line options
for dealing seamlessly with tar archives compressed with either
gzip or bzip2 (see below).“When tar creates an archive, it concatenates the files, each
with a file header containing metadata: the file name, owner,
permissions, and any link information. The metadata is in ASCII for
portability. The archive will therefore transfer all of this file
information along with the file data.”