In terms of availability, 7zip is widely available across UNIX (Linux/BSD/MacOS) and Windows systems. Therefore a zip file is highly portable. xz and 7zip are known to have a better compression algorithm than gzip, but use more memory and time to compress/decompress. when backing up I would recommend tar.7z as it has the highest compression rate saving you space but uses an extra program (7zip). .tar.gz will be larger files and do the same job, you could also use bzip (.tar.bz/bz2) although i'm not sure if that would suit you better as I use gzip or 7zip
In terms of availability,
In terms of availability, 7zip is widely available across UNIX (Linux/BSD/MacOS) and Windows systems. Therefore a zip file is highly portable. xz and 7zip are known to have a better compression algorithm than gzip, but use more memory and time to compress/decompress. when backing up I would recommend tar.7z as it has the highest compression rate saving you space but uses an extra program (7zip). .tar.gz will be larger files and do the same job, you could also use bzip (.tar.bz/bz2) although i'm not sure if that would suit you better as I use gzip or 7zip