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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

I use bupstash.io

Dar

Tar = Tape ARchive

DAR = Disk Archive

It is supposed to replace tar when storing on random access media as tar isn’t random access. Compression and encryption options.

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.