Creating Compressed Archives

In practice, archiving (bundling) and compression (shrinking) are usually done in one step using tar's built-in options.

Gzip Compression (-z)

Use -z to compress the resulting archive using gzip. The filename convention is typically .tar.gz or .tgz.

Create and compress:

bash $ tar -czvf web_backup.tar.gz /var/www/html

Extract and decompress:

bash $ tar -xzvf web_backup.tar.gz

Bzip2 Compression (-j)

Use -j to compress using bzip2. The filename convention is .tar.bz2 or .tbz.

Create and compress:

bash $ tar -cjvf project_v2.tar.bz2 project_B/

Extract and decompress:

bash $ tar -xjvf project_v2.tar.bz2

XZ Compression (-J)

The newer, often most efficient compression method.

bash $ tar -cJvf data.tar.xz data/