Getting Error "too large to archive" while using Tar

Question

Dear All,
I am getting below error while trying to use TAR to acrhive multiple files in one file:
<FileName> too large to archive
The file is of size 2 GB (there are other files with same capacitiy but i am not getting any error for them). Here is waht i am trying to acheive:
(1) Create one tar file from all files in a folder (using tar)
(2) compress the tar file (using compress)
(3) copy the compressed file to the tape (using tar)
One more question, when i use compress (or gzip) command, it create comressed files but original files are not preserved. For example; if i use compress for files a.txt & b .txt it creates a new file (say ab.Z) but removes the files a.txt and b.txt. Is there any option (or any other command) using which i can comress the files without getting them removed?
Thanks in Advance.

Answer 1

Dear Robert,
Thanks for your help. While trying to create tar file using gtar i am now getting below error:
No space left device
So appearantly i don't have enough free space on my file system on which i am trying to create two questions:
(1) Is it possible to compress the tar file resulting from gtar in one command (tar file creation + compress). I don't want files get removed after compression.
(2) Can we directly write to Tape Drive using gtar? Will the size of file resulting from gtar will be same as that of total size of all files or it will be less?
regards,