Tar is the standard. It's pretty easy to produce and consume tar archives on Unix-like systems (especially in a streaming fashion, which comes in handy if your

Tar is the standard. It's pretty easy to produce and consume tar archives on Unix-like systems (especially in a streaming fashion, which comes in handy if your storage is scratch storage is slow/tiny for some reason), and a lot of software will just work with it. Other than that, tar is still frequently used for packing data to be recorded onto LTO tapes (even despite LTFS being a thing).