> It does seem like xz is somewhat overengineered, but [...] any other algorithm with similar compression performance will yield similar behaviour on corrupted

> It does seem like xz is somewhat overengineered, but [...] any other algorithm with similar compression performance will yield similar behaviour on corrupted data You seem to confuse format and compression algorithm. From what the article says, the format seems bad. Once any data is damaged, all the rest of reading the file (as opposed to decompressing the data from file) goes out of the window. No way to re-synchronize reading with data blocks after corruption.