Making multi-part tar archives

hacker supreme · 08-28-2007, 12:14 PM

I would like help with making multi-part file archives in tar.
Preferably making each part of the archive roughly 2GB in size.
(Today I made the discovery that you can't fit 4.6GB of data onto a DVD labeled '4.7GB', no matter how hard you try.

)

I'm currently still googling for an answer.

Thanks to anyone who can help me.

bigrigdriver · 08-28-2007, 12:22 PM

I don't know about doing it with tar, but it can be done with Dar. Read the Dar tutorial (which provides example commands).

You can get Dar here: http://dar.linux.free.fr/

hacker supreme · 08-28-2007, 12:25 PM

thanks for that bigrigdriver.
Trying it now.

almatic · 08-28-2007, 12:45 PM

is 'split' not an option for you ? Other than that I just know of the -Lxx option, which lets you create multivolume archives, but it will ask for tapes iirc. I don't know if you can create multiple files with that.

It can, however, easily be done with zip, rar and all the others ...

hacker supreme · 08-28-2007, 01:19 PM

bigrigdriver: Argh. dar just blows up every time I try to get it to archive my folder. Maybe it doesn't like the look of my documents, eh?
almatic: I'm sticking with tar and gzip for sake of consistency with the other backups.

I just read through the online manual for tar, which explains the usage of -Lxx better than the man page (well, the man page doesn't seem to explain it at all.) so I'm going to try that.
I'll report back what happens making tape archives in a folder on the disc, should go alright, but you never know.

almatic · 08-28-2007, 01:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hacker supreme

almatic: I'm sticking with tar and gzip for sake of consistency with the other backups.

yes, that's why I was suggesting 'split'. Make a full archive, then 'split -b 2000m xyz.tar.gz'. You can put them together again with 'cat ... > xyz.tar.gz'.

But if you find a solution using a native tar option, let me know, i'd be interested as well ...

hacker supreme · 08-28-2007, 05:16 PM

I couldn't get the -Lxx option to work (Yes, I know the xx is numbers.

) so I had to use split. That's worked well.
(WTF?! You can use 2000m? I went and calculated the exact size in bytes.

)

Anyway, it's all worked. Thanks for the help.