You don’t need to extract the whole thing if you use tar. The reason you have to here is because you use zstd/xz on top of it.

Use tar as is. It’s what it’s made for.

Maybe Borg is a possibility. However, I have not yet backed up an entire system with it, but only certain files.

• The file permissions have always been correct when restoring files in my case.
• Which compression (LZ4, zlib, LZMA or zstd) and which compression level is used can be specified when creating a backup.
• Backups can be mounted via FUSE, so that you can restore individual files with an file manager or a terminal emulator, for example.

At least on the Mac (bsdtar) you can extract single files out of a tar file.

E.g.,

Create the tar file:

tar cvzf pseudo.tgz pseudo/

Move to another directory

cd /tmp/tt

Extract a single file:

tar -xf ../pseudo.tgz pseudo/10481_2017.1069.png

You say PC, so might want to check the tar version you are using and see if there are extra parameters to do the file extraction.

Take a look at DAR: http://dar.linux.free.fr/

It has many advanced functions and is actively developed (for over a decade).

Take a look at squashfs. This creates a compressed archive that can be mounted as a read-only filesystem to pull out individual files. It is very fast and likely already installed on your system.

Borg or restic since they do deduplication.

My biggest data regret is rsync-ing or tar-ing up my systems to my fileserver as a backup mechanism. So much wasted space. Extremely difficult to find anything. Impossible to properly organize. These backup solutions improve the situation tremendously.

I use bupstash.io

When I wipe my PC I always use Clonezilla. I have a separate /home partition and I usually copy /etc inside my user’s home directory just before the cloning. I’d say you should give it a try.