@creamy-pencil-82913 would need some clarity on conditional image import > The cache file will store archive metadata as files are processed. Subsequent restarts of K3s will not import the images, as long as the size and modification time of the archive remains the same. In my case, some images inside tarball do not change while other images change. This means size/modification time does change for the tarball. Will k3s again import those images that haven't changed since last k3s restart/upgrade.

There is no way to only process part of the file. That is not how tar files work, you have to read all of it to find out what it contains