The .tar.zst extension indicates a TAR archive compressed with Zstandard, a fast compression algorithm developed by Facebook. This format is favored for its high compression ratios and speed, making it suitable for modern data archiving and transfer tasks. The TAR (Tape Archive) format itself simply consolidates multiple files into a single archive file without compression, whereas Zstandard provides the compression layer, significantly reducing file size.
Historically, TAR has been used extensively in Unix and Linux environments, but with the advent of Zstandard, combining it with TAR has become a popular choice for efficient archiving. To create or extract such files, users rely on command-line tools like tar (with the --zstd option), or graphical utilities that support Zstandard compression.
Across different operating systems, the necessary tools have been integrated into popular archive managers and command-line suites. Linux distributions typically include support for Zstandard and TAR by default, while Windows and macOS users can utilize third-party software such as 7-Zip or PeaZip to handle these files.