TAR.GZ
This format is my weapon of choice for most compression. It gives very good compression while not utilizing too much of the CPU while it is compressing the data. To compress a directory use the following syntax:
# tar -zcvf archive_name.tar.gz directory_to_compress
To decompress an archive use the following syntax:
# tar -zxvf archive_name.tar.gz
This will extract the files in the archive_name.tar.gz archive in the current directory. Like with the tar format you can optionally extract the files to a different directory:
# tar -zxvf archive_name.tar.gz -C /tmp/extract_here/