Anything does better than tar. Tar does not do compression. Tar can call an external compression utility, though. -z calls gzip, -j calls bzip2 and you can call anything you like with --use-compress-program, though most people will just use a pipe at that point, E.G. tar -cvf - /path | fancy_zip > stuff.tar.fzip.

The windows "zip" paradigm says that one utility should gather multiple files & directories into an archive and compress the archive too. The unixy tar paradigm says gathering multiple files & directories into an archive is a job for one program and compression is a job for a 2nd program. "Why have uncompressed archives?" you ask. A single byte corrupted in a compressed archive can ruin the whole archive, whereas in an uncompressed archive only one file will be lost.

Anyway, you're happy with your solution, and that's what matters. Just wanted to ramble about tar and whatnot.

Cheers

--Pileofrogs

Yep, tar isn't that great, but I did discover that recent tar's can handle sparse files! And that's a cool thing if you use these. I very, very, very seldom do, but a sparse file is a good trick to have in the bag.