• danA
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    1 year ago

    They both have their use cases. Zstandard is for compression of a stream of data (or a single file), while 7-Zip is actually two parts: A directory structure (like tar) plus a compression algorithm (like LZMA which it uses by default) in a single app.

    7-Zip is actually adding zstd support: https://sourceforge.net/p/sevenzip/feature-requests/1580/

    • TechieDamien@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Well when using zstd, you tar first, something like tar -I zstd -cf my_tar.tar.zst my_files/*. You almost never call zstd directly and always use some kind of wrapper.

      • danA
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        1 year ago

        Sure, you can tar first. That has various issues though, for example if you just want to extract one file in the middle of the archive, it still needs to decompress everything up to that point. Something like 7-Zip is more sophisticated in terms of how it indexes files in the archive, so I’m looking forward to them adding zstd support.

        FWIW most of my uses of zstd don’t involve tar, but it’s in things like Borgbackup, database systems, etc.