but what happens when you need to make the compressed file not obviously a tarball.. ie. moving the file from system to system triggers huge delays due to virus scanning trying to open the file up, but eventually giving up due to timeouts.. it's a waste of time and the files were scanned on the origional machine prior to compression and will be scanned at the final machine as the tarball contents are written out the the drive again.
the answer is simple.. pipe it through base64
XZ_OPT=-9e tar cJf tarfile.tar.xz directory
becomes
XZ_OPT=-9e tar cJf directory | base64 - > /tarfile.tar.xz.base64
In my case, the tar and .xz are giveaways for the scanner as well, so rename the contents as approprate...
References:
http://strayink.blogspot.com/2016/06/max-xz-tarballs-xz.html