Hi there,

I´ m having certain problems creating tar archives to a tape device. I have a partition with 33 Gb of data, and 2 Gb free. I issued a command to copy all this data to a tape device without problems. At a certain point, the tar job fails and I see that there´s no free space available on the hard disk. I believe that tar creates some sort of temp file to perform the backup to tape, but, now I can´ t recover the space wasted by the "temp" file(s) created by the failed tar job. I´ve searched the hard disk to see if I can find some big temp files, without success.

Another question is how much free space do I need to have to perform this kind of backups using tar?

Any ideas on how to recover this space? Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Cheers.

what about using some sort of compression,like bzip2 or gunzip along with tar?

AFAIK, tar does not, by default (possibly at all), use temporary files.
What command did you use?

The command that I´m using is this:

tar -cvpMf /dev/tape /[0-9A-Za-oq-z]*

to exclude the /proc directory, that blows the copy process. I´m not using any compression. I have another question: if I use compression, will tar need extra space to perform the backup? Is there a way to know who or what is filling up the hard disk with logs, data or something? At this moment, the server is without users (the company that uses it is on holiday) but the space keeps filling up.

Thanks again.

How about
to exclude the /proc dir?

Ian

Thanks for your suggestion, I´ll use it. Two more questions: If tar uses space to create the file before copying to the tape device, where can I find it to erase it, in order to restart the process? (I´m not using compression). If I use compression, how can I restore the tape data?

Thanks.

If it did leave anything, it should be in the directory you were in when you issued the tar command (I think)