Methods and systems for storing data include compressing data inflated from a first compression format into a second format using a processor and verifying contents of the data concurrently with compressing the data. Compression is aborted responsive to a failure of the content verification, but an output of the compression is stored to a tape drive until the compression is aborted. The tape drive is rolled back to a file start position after the compression is aborted and compression of any remaining uncompressed data is skipped after the compression is aborted. The data is stored to the tape drive after rolling the tape drive back.