<story><title>Xz format inadequate for long-term archiving</title><url>http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jl6</author><text>OK, I&amp;#x27;ll bite. This article is overblown in its criticisms and has some issues of its own.&lt;p&gt;1. The article itself recommends that &amp;quot;a tool is supposed to do one thing and do it well&amp;quot;. Well, xz is for compression, nothing else. If you want to check integrity, use a hashing tool such as sha256sum. If you want to recover from errors, generate parity files using par2 or zfec.&lt;p&gt;2. The article claims xz was chosen by prominent open source projects due to hype. No, it was chosen because of its favorable size&amp;#x2F;speed tradeoffs.&lt;p&gt;3. It&amp;#x27;s not clear what the author means by &amp;quot;long-term archiving&amp;quot;. Archives professionals (as in, people who are actually employed by memory institutions) will tell you of many factors (all unmentioned here) that have a bearing on whether a file format (particularly a compressed one) is suitable for use in data preservation.&lt;p&gt;4. The section on trailing data is particularly bizarre. By claiming that xz is &amp;quot;telling you what you can&amp;#x27;t do with your files&amp;quot;, it seems that the author considers it perfectly reasonable to append arbitrary data to the end of a file and expect it to continue functioning. Is my normality detector off today or is this just a wacky thing to want to do?&lt;p&gt;5. The article is written by the author of lzip (which it compares favorably to xz), but does not disclose this. Admittedly it is hosted on the lzip site, but overall the article comes across as an opinionated hit-piece designed to sow doubt in a competitor.</text></comment>
<story><title>Xz format inadequate for long-term archiving</title><url>http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pmoriarty</author><text>When I use xz for archival purposes I always use par2[1] to provide redundancy and recoverability in case of errors.&lt;p&gt;When I burn data (including xz archives) on to DVD for archival storage, I use dvdisaster[2] for the same purpose.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve tested both by damaging archives and scratching DVDs, and these tools work great for recovery.  The amount of redundancy (with a tradeoff for space) is also tuneable for both.&lt;p&gt;[1] - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;BlackIkeEagle&amp;#x2F;par2cmdline&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;BlackIkeEagle&amp;#x2F;par2cmdline&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] - &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;dvdisaster.net&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;dvdisaster.net&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>