''Parent page: [[Storage and file management]]'' [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_file Archiving] means creating one file that contains a number of smaller files within it. Reducing the number of files by creating an archive can improve the efficiency of file storage and help you stay within [[Storage_and_file_management#Filesystem_quotas_and_policies|quota limits]]. Archiving can also improve the efficiency of [[General directives for migration|file transfers]]. It is faster for the secure copy protocol ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_copy scp]), for example, to transfer one archive file of a reasonable size than thousands of small files of equal total size. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_compression Compressing] means encoding a file such that the same information is contained in fewer bytes of storage. The advantage for long-term data storage should be obvious. For [[General directives for migration|data transfers]], the time spent for compressing data must be balanced against the time saved moving fewer bytes as described in this discussion of [https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/data-transfer-doc data compression and transfer] from the US National Center for Supercomputing Applications. * The best-known tool for archiving files in the Linux community is tar. Here is [[a tutorial on 'tar']]. * A replacement for tar called dar offers some advantages in functionality. Here is [[Dar|a tutorial on 'dar']]. Both tar and dar can compress files as well as archive. * The zip utility, more commonly used in the Windows community but available on our clusters, also provides both archiving and compression. * Compression tools gzip, bzip2 and xz can be used in conjunction with tar, or by themselves.