we had the same problem, we now store the data uncompressed on the tape.
And still get frequent errors.

On Fri, Sep 13, 2002 at 06:14:46PM +0100, Niall O Broin wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 13, 2002 at 10:25:29AM -0400, Jon LaBadie wrote:
> 
> > Is it a real, or theoretical, problem?  I.e. has anybody experienced bit 
> > errors
> > in a gzip'ed document?  For me the incidence is low enough that I don't 
> > feel a
> > need to use bzip2 for that extra protection.  The value of your data may 
> > lead
> > to a different conclusion.
> 
> I brought this up and it's not theoretical - I've had problems with gzipped
> tar files coming back off tapes. I definitely have problems with my tape
> drive but as mentioned, such errors in a tar file would only have caused
> problems with some files - with the gzipped tar file, you're done for once
> you hit an error.