Unable to restore from backup: "Failed to extract the archive"

Symptoms

When attempting to restore an account from a tar file, either from the command line or through the cPanel/WHM interface, you receive an error similar to the following.

Failed to extract the archive at /home/backup.tar.gz: The tar archive
extraction failed because of the error "The '/usr/bin/gtar' command 
(process 12345) reported error number 2 when it ended."
pigz: skipping: <stdin>: corrupted -- incomplete deflate data

When running tar with the tzf options for the tar file, the following is returned.

[root@server ~]cPs# tar tzf /full/path/to/file.tar.gz
...
gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

Description

This issue occurs when the archive file is corrupt and the contents can not be extracted.

Workaround

In this situation, you would need to extract the account from a different archive file or, if transferring from another server, recreate the archive file from the source files.