How to compress files with xz and upload archive to Google cloud ?

First, install Google cloud command line tool and configure it.

1. pip install gsutil
2. Have your project id ready using gsutil config. Check docs for more info.

Create the archive / compressed file

3. tar --create --verbose --xz --file images.tar.xz /directory/containing/images/*

Upload the archive/compressed file to Google cloud

4. gsutil cp images.tar.xz gs://<bucket name>. replace <bucket name> with your Google cloud bucket name 😄.

If you want to extract contents (images in this case) from archive, use this command tar -xf file.tar.xz.

xz is supposed to be the “best” general purpose compression algorithm in terms of compression ratio, but it’s also slow.