RE: OT: cluster size=0

[Paul Bunn <Paul UltraBac com>]

FAT/FAT32 have a 2^32 file-size limitation (4GB).  EXT2 has a 2^31 (2GB) file-size
limitation.
Tape has no limitation of course, a lone benefit of the absence of any
file-system.

Regards,

Paul Bunn, UltraBac.com, 425-644-6000
Microsoft MVP - WindowsNT/2000
http://www.ultrabac.com
 

-----Original Message-----
From: W Bauske [mailto:wsb@paralleldata.com]
Sent: Saturday, March 24, 2001 12:07 PM
To: axp-list@redhat.com
Subject: Re: OT: cluster size=0


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.