The folder I was trying to archive is about 72GB, but much like rsync at about 17GB it chokes because of the filesize.  What's with so many common and essential Linux tools having such limitations?  I guess it is likely that the authors never wrote their code with the idea that files would be so large but it's still very annoying.  It's important to stay on top of these limitations on production servers because I didn't realize what happened until I checked the file with "gzip -t" and the archive was too short.  I then ran the same script again on that directory and recorded the output as shown below from gzip.

time tar -czpf somefile.tar.gz archive-directory

gzip: stdout: File too large

real    33m15.478s
user    0m2.440s
sys     0m34.498s

gzip -V
gzip 1.3.5
(2002-09-30)
Copyright 2002 Free Software Foundation
Copyright 1992-1993 Jean-loup Gailly
This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You may redistribute copies of this program
under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
For more information about these matters, see the file named COPYING.
Compilation options:
DIRENT UTIME STDC_HEADERS HAVE_UNISTD_H HAVE_MEMORY_H HAVE_STRING_H HAVE_LSTAT ASMV
Written by Jean-loup Gailly.

Solutions/Alternatives to gzip?

I don't know the specific limitations of other formats but I'm currently trying to tar and bzip2 the same directory and will report back.  I wonder if rar is a viable option and what the maximum size is.  At the very least, rar may make the most sense because you can easily split the archives into 4GB files and this also makes for easy DVD-R backups as well.

bzip2 had the same error at the 17GB mark (and this also shows how much SLOWER bzip2 is with hardly much better compression):

bzip2: I/O or other error, bailing out.  Possible reason follows.
bzip2: File too large
        Input file = (stdin), output file = (stdout)

real    199m7.113s
user    0m2.200s
sys     0m29.714s