Re: NetBSD tar and large files.

[Ian Clark <mrrooster%gmail.com@localhost>]

On 10 September 2010 13:50, Sad Clouds 
<cryintothebluesky%googlemail.com@localhost> wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Sep 2010 05:24:01 -0700
> Andy Ruhl <acruhl%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
>
[snip]
>
> OK, I found out what was wrong, looks like GNU tar has much more
> helpful error messages:
>
> gtar: music.tar: Cannot write: No space left on device
> gtar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
>
> I had 7GB of free space on USB stick, but it's formated with FAT32
> filesystem, so after tar creates 4GB file, the filesystem is full.
>
IIRC there's a 4G filesize limit on fat32, you might be able to split
it up though?

> After digging around, looks like NetBSD tar uses ustar format, which
> has file size limit of 8GB. This is still problematic, so my original
> question stands. I have another music directory with more than 8GB of
> data to back up, so NetBSD tar probably won't work.
>

I think this is a limit on the size of files that can be stored in the
tar archive, rather than the archive itself. I've definatly used
NetBSD tar to create tar files greater than 8GB (I use tar if I need
to copy files from different mount points, so I've done something
along the lines of " tar -C / --one-file-system -cf - . | tar -C
/mount -xpf -" with over 100G of data.

However I have also had trouble with individual files above 8G not
being storable.

Infact, I've just noticed this:

(ian:~)$ ls -lh /usr3/*tar
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel   87G Jun  4 23:06 /usr3/rootbackup_04Jun2010.tar
(ian:~)$

Which was created with NetBSD tar.

Cheers,

Ian