Comment by adrian_b

Yes, I completely disagree with TFA.

The problem described in TFA is not specific to Apple, but the same problem appears when archiving any decent filesystem that has been designed during the last 3 decades and not a half of century ago, including all Linux file systems.

The problem described in TFA is not caused by Apple, but by the author using an obsolete tar program and not being aware of this.

The traditional tar file format cannot store a lot of the metadata that is contained in modern file systems (e.g. high resolution timestamps, access control lists, extended file attributes), so it is useless for such file systems.

Most modern "tar" implementations have added extensions to the tar file format, to make it usable with modern file systems, such as Linux XFS or Linux EXT4. But many of these extensions are incompatible between themselves, so certain tar files can be fully extracted only with the same tar program that has created them.

I strongly recommend against using the old tar or cpio file formats. Even with various extensions it is not guaranteed that they always work correctly.

I always use only the pax file format, which has also required extensions in order to work with the modern file systems, but the pax extensions are cleaner than those for tar, because the file format is better designed.

Libarchive, which was mentioned in TFA, is available in most Linux distributions or it can be built from source on any Linux computer. It provides an executable that is preferable to tar (better invoked as "bsdtar --format=pax") for the backup or transfer of any Linux files.

I have not checked recently GNU tar or other tar programs available on Linux, and I hope that meanwhile they have been upgraded to be able to archive losslessly the Linux file systems, but some years ago that was not true, so using tar or cpio on Linux could easily corrupt the archived files.