Re: OT: cluster size=0

["W Bauske" <wsb paralleldata com>]

James Fowler wrote:
> 
> Sorry for the OT, but I am really stumped on this one.  I was attempting
> to back up a win95 FAT32 partition by doing a 'tar -cvf' on it and storing
> the tar file on another disk.  I had some problems as the tar file would
> exceed 2GB and then tar would die telling me that the archive was too big
> to continue (even though there was 15GB still available on the device
> where the archive was being written).  [I figure that the 2GB things was
> due to the fact that it was a 2.2.14 kernel that must not have supported a
> file size above 2GB. This seems less important right now.]

Just a comment on the 2GB error. I create and write to tape tar files
much larger than 2GB, on the order of 20-30GB all the time. I recall
at some point in the past running into the same error you describe when
the output is a disk file. Not sure why tar has that problem on disk
but obviously tar has no way of determining file limits on a pipe. I
typically issue a command like this:

tar -cvf - your_dir | dd of=/dev/st0 ibs=1024k obs=1024k

Then to get it back:

dd if=/dev/st0 ibs=1024k obs=1024k | tar -xvf -

You could probably just specify a disk file for dd and it will work
for that too.

Wes