title: Archival filesystem or format
body: <p>I'm looking for a file type for storing archives of systems that have been decomissioned. At the moment, we primarily use tar.gz, but finding and extracting just a few files from a 200GB tar.gz archive is unwieldy, since tar.gz doesn't support any sort of random-access read provision. <em>(And before you get the idea, mounting a tgz using FUSE doen't make it better.)</em></p>
  
  <p>Here's what we've found so far -- I'd like to know what other options there are:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><strong>tar.gz</strong> -- poor random-access read</li>
  <li><strong>zip</strong> -- lacks support for some advanced filesystem features (e.g: hard links, xattrs)</li>
  <li><strong>squashfs</strong> -- takes an extremely long time to create a large archive (many hours) and poor userspace tools.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I'm trying to think of a simple way of creating a full-featured filesystem image into as small a space as possible -- ext2 in a cloop image, but it doesn't seem like a particularly user-friendly solution.</p>
  
  <p>Presumably this problem has been solved before -- are there any options I've missed?</p>