best practice for tar and gzip?

[patrick q <rpmq@yahoo.com>]

Hi,

I have a lot of important archives, up to 10,000 files per ~10 Meg
tar.gz tarball, that I like to keep as safe as possible.

I test the archives when I create them, have backups, and off-site
backups of backups, but I am worried about possible file corruption, ie
propagating possibly corrupt files through the backup rotation.
  
Would it not be better to compress the files individually first and
then tar them into an archive instead of the normal tar.gz operation,
to have the best chance of recovering as many files as possible?

thx,
patrick.

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