But why would you want to extract if you can mount the file directly? For simple archives, extracting is fine. But for larger archives (like a compiler -- 1000

But why would you want to extract if you can mount the file directly? For simple archives, extracting is fine. But for larger archives (like a compiler -- 1000 files or more), loop-mounting is much better than extracting: - Does not slow down your backup by adding thousands of files - No need to wait for initial file extraction - You can quickly and easily verify integrity of the whole archive And if you are using fuse, it does not require any special privileges either!