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
