This business about tar reminds me of a not-terribly well documented problem
with tar: under some operatinjg systems, tar has a 2 gigabyte limit on the
size of 
the tar archive! The tar that came with red hat 7.3 had this limitation, I
believe. 
This is listed on the web somewhere--perhaps it should be part of the FAQ.

Even splitting DLEs into 10 gig chunks won't help if the tar archive is
silently truncated...  

-FL