I want to create a tgz file of my home. I won't use a GUI app, but use the console.

I intend to make the tgz file in a smbmount I made to another computer of the windows network (I don't have any room left in my computer).

The smbmount is already made. Say it's /mnt/tmp ().

my home directory is /home/user

What is the command or command pipe to get this done?

PS
I tried to make a zip file of it, but it failed. The temp file stuck at 2.1 GBs. Is it a zip file restriction... or a remote FS restriction? The remote partition must be NTFS on XP (my home is 16 GBs).

tar -cpzf /mnt/tmp/user.tgz /home/user

Oh.. thanks for replaying. I had just found the answer (very similar to yours):

tar zcvf /mnt/tmp/blahblah.tgz /home/user

16gigs huh...you may want to use bunzip since it has slightly better compression that gunzip. You can use jtshaw's command like this:

tar -cpjf /mnt/tmp/usr.bz2 /home/user

or is it usr.tar.bz2? I can't remember off the top of my head but it doesn't really matter.

You want the p in there with the tar command so the permissions are saved.

Oh... that's what the p does?

Ok. will use it (for executables, cause all the files are mine... and ONLY mine).

cd /home
tar zcvf /mnt/tmp/user.tgz user

Forget this if your Windows partitions isn't NTFS. FAT32 supports 2GB files max.

Expect this to take a while:
- Compressing 16GB is long.
- Archive is created over the network.

2.1 GBs limit in FAT32... I know.

16 GBs through the net... it's gonna take a while.... I know.

And then again.... it crached at 2.1 GBs. I just checked and it's NTFS.

What the hell!!!!! I'll find another way.

You can split it to pieces with: tar -cpzf - source_file | split -b 2000m - tarpiece-
and later put them together with: cat tarpiece-* > filename.tar.gz
That will make pieces less than 2GB.

Thanks for all the help, guys!

The split one was a win-killer!

thats weird because i had a 8 gigabyte iso file in xp ntfs. so i guess its a limitation of smbfs.

that could be the problem.... anyway... thanks to split, I'm putting my backup just nicely.

It is a samba problem, just google for: samba 2GB limit