[kq76]

If the reasoning for using tar.gz is just to have smaller archives, people might want to look into the 7z format. For example, in a test of the sizes of compressed archives for a full 6.5 lg folder I got the following results:

zip: 13.435 MB
rar: 12.337 MB
tar.gz: 7.478 MB, 6:04 minutes tarring, 1:33 minutes gzipping, 7:37 minutes total using PowerArchiver 6.1
7z: 4.613 MB, 5:49 minutes using 7zip 4.42

People should also note that while tar.gz can be smaller than zip and rar because it first archives all the files into 1 file then compresses that 1 file rather than those methods of compressing individual files and then archiving them, the "drawbacks to a GZiped Tar archive is that you can not add files to or extract individual files from an already existing archive. One file can be extracted from the archive but not quickly as Gzip will uncompress the whole archive for tar to then search for and extract a single file."

http://www.cit.gu.edu.au/~anthony/info/misc/tgz_vs_zip

Why the 7z format is so much smaller and faster or what drawbacks it has, I don't know. The free 7zip program can also tar.gz, but you need to do the tarring and gzipping steps separately.

EDIT: I originally mistakenly said tar.gz was faster than zip and rar when I meant to say smaller.