Archiving

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File Format
Name Archiving
Ontology

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(Lossless, for generic data + file archives)

Contents

Archiving only

(many files => 1 file, no compression attempted)

Compression + archiving

(Multiple files => 1 file, makes it smaller. See Compression for formats that compress single files/streams, and Disk Image Formats for formats that capture the low-level structure of a disk)

Diff files

(containing only the parts of a file that have changed, so they can be applied to an existing file to update it; used for update distribution and incremental backups)

See also Wikipedia:Data differencing.

Encrypted or cryptographically signed archives

File splitting

(1 file => multiple files. Most file splitting utilities just produce raw file fragments, and don't have a native file format. But some use a container format, and some create a separate "control" file for metadata.)

Also, the two sorts of Horcrux, Horcrux (jesseduffield) and Horcrux (kndyry), are split-and-encrypted files.

Filesystem backup and restoration

Formats designed for backing up disks, usually specifically targeted at particular filesystems (but backing it up in the form of file structures, not raw sector images like Disk Image Formats).

See also Backup.

Institutional archiving

Metadata formats

(see also Metadata, Bibliographic data)

Miscellaneous

Program/App/Applet/Installer specialized archive formats

Self-extracting archives

(in addition, some of the other archivers are able to produce executable files for some platform which include the archived data and a program to extract them, and generally have the file extension normal for executables, such as .exe for DOS/Windows. In many cases, if you rename the extension to the appropriate one for the archive type involved, e.g., .zip, the file will open in the appropriate archiver, which is handy for extracting them on systems not compatible with the original executable.)

Software

Refer to Compression and archiving software.

Transfer formats

(encapsulate a system-specific file structure to make it compatible with foreign systems, file transfer protocols, etc.)

For low-level transfer encodings, see Transfer Encodings.

See also

Links

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