Alternatives to compressed tarballs

I am reading/writing data from/to tapes using Debian and recently ran into an issue where I needed to figure out the size of the stored data stream, i.e. the data actually written to the tape (see [this question](https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/698589)) . In short, using .tar.lzma, this does not seem to be possible without copying the entire archive off the tape first. Are there any alternative container formats to compressed tarballs that: - allow for determining the full size of the archive itself linearly (i.e. without shoe-shining the tape) - determine the size *without* reading the entire archive to disk - allow for linear decompression/access - are Linux-compatible (BSD-compatibility is fine too) I think [7-Zip](https://7-zip.org/) may work in this situation, but isn't it discouraged for archival in *nix environments?