Recently we’ve decided to change the compression algorithm used for blog backups. In simple terms, this means blog backups are no longer in *.tar.gz format but in *.tar.zst format. Many companies (e.g. GitHub) are using this compression algorithm because it’s a lot faster and has a higher compression rate.
Here are just a few articles that support this claim and talk about zstd vs. gzip in-depth:
- Compressing JSON: gzip vs zstd
- Comparing common compression tools using real-world data
- Smaller and faster data compression with Zstandard
Before we made the change, we also tested zstd compression and found that an average blog backup is smaller by 8%, and the backup is created 75% faster. We felt this optimization is significant enough to make the change.
What do EBN users get out of this? Because the backup size will be smaller, it will be faster to download blog backups. This will be especially noticeable if you want to download multiple blog backups simultaneously.
Once you download the new version of the backup, you can use one of the following tools to extract the archive:
- https://peazip.github.io/zstandard-compression-utility.html (Windows)
- https://www.tc4shell.com/en/7zip/modern7z/ plugin for 7-zip (Windows)
- https://www.keka.io/en/ (macOS)
