[LinuxBender]

Perhaps renice your job so that others don't complain about their noisy neighbor.

    renice 19 -p $$ > /dev/null 2>&1

then ...

Use tar + xz to save extra metadata about the file(s), even if it is only 1 file.

    tar cf - ~/test_files/* | xz -9ec -T0 > ./test.tar.xz

If that (or the extra options in tar for xattrs) is not enough, then create a checksum manifest, always sorted.

    sha256sum ~/test_files/* | sort -n > ~/test_files/.sha256

Then use the above command to compress it all into a .tar file that now contains your checksum manifest.