A .tar archive is basically only the files cat’ed together, with a header and index added, right?
And a .tar.gz takes forever to modify, because it needs to first extract the .tar.
So why is there no archive format that just cat’es the compressed files together?
You can save .tar.gz files to actual tapes. As you said, it’s just one and zeros.
Of course, and that is done very often. But why would you want to save a .gz.tar file on a tape?