Archive files (.tar, .zip) and file systems (ext4, NTFS, FAT32) are two sides of the same coin. Both provide fundamental facilities for hierarchical data storage, record file metadata, support basic file system operations (add, remove, modify). Some file systems do versioning (btrfs), some archivers do too (zpaq). Some natively support compression (zfs), but so do archivers (zip). The crucial difference between both is thus the use case. Most file systems are used for live infrastructure (FAT32, NTFS, ext4). Some file systems are used for seekable, immutable and compressed storage (squashfs, cromfs). Then, archives are used for data meant to be just compressed and extracted.
