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If you have a folder full of media files (jpg|mp3|avi) then zip is going to waste a lot of time and CPU cycles over just tar-ing it all up.

Other than that, I've just used tar directly in some edge-cases to fit within some constraints.

unless you just want to _quickly_ package some files, use tar, skip the compression.

tar's specialty was writing archives directly to tape (Tape ARchive) and minimizing tape-seeks as much as possible. Yeah, it's a pretty old program.