Abstract: The techniques disclosed herein generate minimally sized diff archives. As a result, bandwidth, storage, and processing costs of storing or transmitting an archive are reduced. In some configurations, a diff archive is generated utilizing specific knowledge of the structure of the source and target archives it is derived from. Specifically, an archive-specific tokenization engine identifies data chunks and payload files within each archive. Recipes for generating payload files from data chunks and data chunks from payload files are identified and stored in a manifest file, as are recipes for decompressing files, concatenating data chunks, and generating binary deltas that convert older versions of a file into a newer version. These recipes are composed by replacing recipe inputs with the outputs of other recipes. Composite recipes use inline data and data obtained from a copy of the source archive to reconstitute the target archive.