Gzipping a tar file as whole is drop dead easy and even implemented as option inside tar. So far, so good. However, from an archiver's point of view, it would be better to tar the gzipped single files. (The rationale behind it is, that data loss is minified, if there is a single corrupt gzipped file, than if your whole tarball is corrupted due to gzip or copy errors.)

Has anyone experience with this? Are there drawbacks? Are there more solid/tested solutions for this than

find folder -exec gzip '{}' \;
tar cf folder.tar folder