Archive transfer

How it works

The archive format decides random access and size limits. Tar needs a second compression step. ZIP64 is required past 4 GB in many tools. The transfer itself is a normal binary copy. The acceptance test is unpack plus hash. A lifecycle rule should not expire the archive before the recipient unpacks.

A lab tars 40 GB of CSVs and gzips them to 11 GB. The gzip transfers. The recipient gunzips and gets a short tar that fails. The gzip hash did not match. They refetch. Shipping the uncompressed tar would have been 40 GB and a longer window. They chose compression and a hash of the gzip, which is the right pair.

How it differs

An archive transfer is not cold storage. Glacier-class tiers are a storage class. An archive file is a package. People mix the nouns and then cannot open the thing they downloaded.

Splitting archives into volumes without saying so leaves the recipient with part 1 and a CRC error.

Password-protected archives fail virus scan on the server because the scanner cannot see inside. Expect a hold, not a clean bill.

On the ticket

• The practical close is a log line: time, actor, byte count, result.
• Without that line the transfer is a story.
• With it, the next person can see whether this door did what the ticket claimed.
• If the path is shared, say so in the partner profile so a later change does not silently pick a different limit, key, or region.