# tar

19 Hacker News commenters recommended tar and 13 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Free archiver standard on nearly every Unix-like system, reliable for copying and backing up files. Main caveat: options and behaviour differ between GNU, BSD and macOS versions.

## Why people recommend it

- Standard and present on nearly every system (3 comments): "Uncompressed .tar is a reasonable choice for this application because the tools to read/write tar files are very standard" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47890513)) "there is always tar(1) even in the most basic of distributions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46121349)) "this has been fine working since the 80s" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48884877))
- Simple and reliable for backups (4 comments): "I do this all the time with tar by itself and it's wire-proof enough to work fine" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46345369)) "This is a beautifully simple approach." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48686097)) "tar is great, and well kown" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47554744))
- Fast for bulk file transfers (3 comments): "I've achieved significant speeds ups by tarring the directory first" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46859887)) "for initial migrations I often find myself simply using tar instead" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49416690)) "One of my "goto" tools is copying files over a "tar pipe"." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46863673))
- Handles sparse files and incremental deltas (3 comments): "Note that tar and rsync can handle sparse files, but scp doesn't." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46868432)) "tar can compute deltas using only the small `.snar` file" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49735302)) "tar can handle sparse files, whereas scp doesn't" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46868144))

## What people warn about

- Options and utilities inconsistent across versions (3 comments): "its terribly ancient utilities and gratuitous incompatibility with modern Linux utilities" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48004987)) "If you use some UNIX tar, you will understand why everybody hates it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46245651)) "tar: unknown option -- - usage: tar {crtux}" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46241039))
- Poor random access to files (3 comments): "unlike TAR, allowing direct random to the files without "extracting" them or seeking through the entire file" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46751998)) "tar has no centralised directory. The only way to get file 100 is to walk trough the 99 files before" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46126220)) "Compressed TAR is not great for random access" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49283242))
- Lacks modern filesystem metadata (2 comments): "The traditional tar file format cannot store a lot of the metadata that is contained in modern file systems" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48006515)) "tar doesn't preserve creation/birth times and keeping that original metadata is important to some people" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49417236))
- Compressed archives must be extracted first (2 comments): "Compressed TAR is not great for random access" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49283242)) "A tarfule you have to uncompress first." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47890095))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Zstandard (zstd)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zstd.md): 111 recommend
- [Brotli](https://hackerapproved.com/p/brotli.md): 24 recommend
- [gzip](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gzip.md): 23 recommend
- [NNCP](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nncp.md): 15 recommend
- [xz](https://hackerapproved.com/p/xz.md): 14 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "tar", https://hackerapproved.com/p/tar/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).