If missing, enable via:
# From WSL Bash, call Windows tar tar.exe -czf /mnt/c/backup.tar.gz /mnt/c/Users/MyUser
:: On Linux: create archive with numeric owner IDs tar --numeric-owner -czf data.tar.gz /opt/app tar for windows
Historically, the .tar format was designed for magnetic tape drives, prioritizing the streaming of data over random access. It creates a single, uncompressed archive of multiple files, which is almost always subsequently compressed using a utility like gzip (resulting in .tar.gz ) or bzip2 (resulting in .tar.bz2 ). For a long time, Windows could not natively handle these files. A Windows user attempting to open a source code distribution from the internet would be met with a blank stare from File Explorer. This necessitated the installation of third-party tools. Applications like 7-Zip became essential software for any power user, bridging the gap by decompressing the "tarball" in two steps: first unzipping, then untarring.
Windows tar.exe supports the following compression filters via the appropriate flags: If missing, enable via: # From WSL Bash,
While TAR is an excellent archiving tool, there are alternative options available on Windows:
| Limitation | Workaround | |------------|-------------| | No sparse file detection | Use --sparse (sometimes ignored on NTFS) | | No atomic updates | Write to temp file then rename | | No archive splitting | Use split command: tar -czf - largefolder \| split -b 100M - backup.tar.gz. | | Slow on network drives | Copy locally first, then archive | | Cannot read password-protected ZIP | Convert to tar first | A Windows user attempting to open a source
Prepared by Systems Engineering For internal distribution and technical reference.