Ubuntu :: What's The Most Reliable, Corruption-resistant Archive Format

I'm wanting to create a one-time snapshot archive of all my data in case something catastrophic ever happens to my main hard drive and my backup drive. I should add that I update my main backup regularly, which means that I wouldn't notice any creeping data corruption problems until it's too late...which is another reason a one-time snapshot is so important.Since I'm archiving a snapshot of all of my data at once, only a hard drive is big enough to handle the job. (I'll copy a small fraction - the truly 100% irreplaceable stuff - to DVD-R's too, but that doesn't mean I particularly want to lose any of the other stuff either.) Unfortunately, this means my storage medium doesn't inherently have any CRC's, error correction/redundancy bits, etc. built into it like data DVD's might.

So: What archive format would you suggest using for maximum reliability and resistance to corruption?My main concern is making sure that I can still open the archive and extract surviving files even if some of the bits (or the entirety of other files) go corrupt. This is my last-ditch fallback archive, so if I ever need to use it, I really, really don't want to get a message saying the archive is corrupt and cannot be opened at all! Because of that, it's important that the individual files and folders are compressed separately from each other...if at all. I don't care about the compression ratio, and I'd even be happy if the archive was 150% the size of my data thanks to a gigantic recovery record. I also care about CRC's and such, since I'll want to know which files/folders/etc. are corrupt vs. which ones are still intact.