best way to make sure a tar.gz file is not corrupt

[Red Squirrel]

I started making occasional offsite backups of my most important home data, since I was thinking to myself how devastated I would be if there was a disaster such as a fire and that I lost all my data. Some of it is projects I've been working on for more then 5 years, some of it is advanced stuff that is simply not recoverable. (ex: not just redownload from some site)

So my backup jobs also duplicate some of the important stuff into this "offsite" folder and I occasionally upload those files to my leased server. I'll probably be doing this like once a month. These are tar.gz files. What is the best way, within a windows box (win server 2003 to be exact) to validate those archives? If I open it and see the folders am I safe to assume its not corrupted? I want to avoid actually extracting it on the server as it might case lag. (game server)

 

[Schadenfroh]

With 7-zip, you can just right click on it and "test" the archive.

 

[Red Squirrel]

hmm never even noticed that. 7zip is actually already installed on the server so I'll take a look at that option.