Xz format inadequate for long-term archiving

lotuseclat79 · Oct 22, 2016

Xz format inadequate for long-term archiving

One of the challenges of digital preservation is the evaluation of data formats. It is important to choose well-designed data formats for long-term archiving. This article describes the reasons why the xz compressed data format, in spite of its popularity among some free software projects, is not adequate for long-term archiving and has a reduced value as a general-purpose compressed format. The relevant weaknesses and design errors in the xz format are analyzed and, where applicable, compared with the corresponding behavior of the bzip2, gzip and lzip formats. Key findings include: (1) xz's extensibility is unreasonable and problematic; (2) xz is vulnerable to unprotected flags and length fields; (3) LZMA2 is unsafe and less efficient than the original LZMA; (4) xz includes useless features that increase the number of false positives for corruption; (5) xz shows inconsistent behavior with respect to trailing data; (6) error detection in xz is several times less accurate than in bzip2, gzip and lzip.
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-- Tom

Amanda · Oct 22, 2016

Going to post this to the Arch forums and see what people say about it.
To me, it's working fine. tar.xz is fast as hell.

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Xz format inadequate for long-term archiving

lotuseclat79 Registered Member

Amanda Registered Member

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Xz format inadequate for long-term archiving

lotuseclat79 Registered Member

Amanda Registered Member

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