Hi
Im trying to backup my home directory using tar and end up with a files thats about 10gig!

The problem I am having is now what to do with such a large file.
Is there a way to split the file up to a reasonable size to burn to dvd or another partition?

Or is there a way that tar will create multiple files a set size e.g. 5 x 2gig files?

Thanks Danny

Tar, by itself, does not compress the files it 'only' puts al the files in an archive.

You could use the z option that is part of tar to also compress the archive.

$ tar zcf <nametar.tgz> <target(s)>

It is possible that the z flag is not supported/compiled in. In this case use bzip2 (or simular) to compress your archive.

If the created file is still to big, you could use split to create multiple parts.

Hope this gets you going again.

Thanks for the reply

I Have tried to get split working but am having alot of errors.

In testing I created an archive using tar -czvf with know problem.
When I try to split the archive using

split -b 50m <filename> <dest filename>

It goes through most of the motions then I get an error at the end

gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now


I tried creating the archive through bzip and got a different error:

bzip2: Compressed file ends unexpectedly;
perhaps it is corrupted? *Possible* reason follows.
bzip2: Inappropriate ioctl for device
Input file = (stdin), output file = (stdout)

It is possible that the compressed file(s) have become corrupted.
You can use the -tvv option to test integrity of such files.

You can use the `bzip2recover' program to attempt to recover
data from undamaged sections of corrupted files.



The Dist I am using is Fedora Core 1 with standard kernel
P III 800mhz
300M of ram
40gig harddisk

Any other suggestions on this problem would be great!!

Thanks Danny

Too bad you did not posted the commands you used, it should work.

Create the archive:
$ tar zcf druuna.tgz *

Split the created archive:
$ split -b 50000 druuna.tgz druuna.tgz.

Depending on the size of druuna.tgz, you wil end up with several druuna.tgz.aa, druuna.tgz.ab etc etc. Each 50000 bytes long (-b 50000). man split for details. The original will not be deleted.

To put them back together:

$ cat druuna.tgz.* > druuna.tgz

Hope this clears things up a bit.

Thanks Problem solved!!!


The problem was split was working properly but the way I was trying to extract at the end was wrong

I was trying to un tar the file <Filename.tgz.aa> Instead of using cat (which is not mentioned in the man page)!


Thanks

Danny

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