dd command - Exceeded file size
 

Hi there,

I am new in Linux. At work they gave me an HPwx9400 system with Red Hat Linux version
I tried to use dd command (after reading a lot of available tutorials, including the very informative one posted here) to back up all my drives.
I decided to do that on an external usb hard drive.
But since the resulting file was becoming too large it appeared a message saying that maximum file size have been reached (since the FAT32 that was the external hard drive does not support larger files).

What can I do to solve this problem?
Any suggestions are welcome. My purpose is to make an entire image of my hard drive.

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/...ns_using_split

There are also other solutions like rsync... and one that I hadn't heard about recently came up in the news section:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...re-gap-609258/

Hope that helps

You can use split. For restoring, cat the parts together and pipe the output into a dd command. Without an "if=" argument, standard input is used. You could also have gzip or bzip2 in a pipe to reduce the size of each slice. This will work better if the unused space is zeroed. You can do this by using something like "dd if=/dev/zero of=zerofile bs=512 count=$(($FREEBLOCKS-1))"
I did this to back up my boot partition. It compressed to 1/10 the size of the partition.

Another solution is to create an ext3 partition on the external drive.

Thanks for the help.