What's the state of the art in archive formats?

[SolidComp]

Hi all – What's the state of the art in archive formats, or combined archive+compression formats? Is 7z considered the best? (Does Zstd have archive features?) Did Bulat have one?

It seems like there hasn't been much movement from TAR files, because I see people slinging them around constantly. I'm vaguely aware of RAR but I don't know much about it.

I stumbled on this article by some dude named Antonio Diaz, arguing that XZ is inadequate for long-term archival. I haven't finished it yet, but it got me thinking about specifying a super safe archival and compression format for long-term data archival. Most of these formats seem largely undocumented, which is strange. It would be nice to have a combined format so that it takes only one step to both archive and compress.

What makes for a good archival format? What features or philosophy?

Thanks.

[Bulat Ziganshin]

today, 7z and arc are the best archive formats available. read https://github.com/Bulat-Ziganshin/FA to learn how they can be improved

[Jyrki Alakuijala]

What makes for a good archival format? What features or philosophy?

My favorite: Local damage to the data should not destroy all or most of it. This is one reason why tar.gz is not a great archive.