TAR + filesize limit?

[wa4fat]

Please excuse this question if I've chosen the wrong forum, and thanks in advance for any thoughts.

I notice that the cpanel backup on one of my servers is now omitting one very large account (3.5GB). If I try to manually tar this particular account, tar percolates along quite nicely for about 10 minutes or so, and then returns the command prompt. However, no tarball is created.

I have no issues creating tarballs of smaller accounts, so I'm speculating that my version of tar may have some file size limitations. The particular version of tar in question is 1.13.25.

Has anyone else encountered this issue?

Thanks -- Bill

[chirpy]

IIRC the restriction is based on the filesystem used on the partition. If you do:

du -T

What do you have for the Type for the disk you're tar'ing the files on?

[wa4fat]

du -T doesn't appear to be a valid argument for the version of du on my box ...

I'm trying to tar a file to a backup hard drive, and have been told that 2 GB is the size limit for any file, tar or otherwise, on the Linux ext2 file system. (I believe I have ext3 on this particular drive, however.) That leaves me to wonder what sort of alternative backup scheme I might employ to handle this particular client's 3.5GB of data.

[theuruguayan]

tar have a 2 gig limitation the last time i check.

in case of gzip is 4 gig, and with a patch you can do more than that.. check the site gzip.org for more info..

carlos

[chirpy]

Well, I can happily create tarballs in excess of 3GB on CentOS3.4 using tar-1.13 and ext3. What OS and version are you actually running?

Found this helpful page:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=25116

[eth00]

I have found it possible to create tar's bigger then 2gb BUT then cannot uncompress them. Another problem with large tarballs is that the chance for data corruption is pretty high.

[DigitalN]

Well, one certain datacenter once tarred up the entire /home directory when I asked them to recover data from one dead raid drive once, instead of copying the data to the new drive as I asked them to (they had to do this from a rebuilt array and then copy the data to the new hard drive, was a bit of a messy one), and then put it into the server so it could be easily restored, they tarred up and then moved it to the new drive, rather than copy it over :sigh: - The tar file was 96GB in size, it took a fair while to extract that back to /home (about 8 hours i think from memory) not a happy badger but there were no problems with the data, just took eons to do it.

[wa4fat]

Thanks to all for their posts. I am still without a backup solution for one particular account which has a /home directory in excess of 3.5GB ... apparently stymied by the TAR 2GB file size limitation. Any suggestions would sure be appreciated - thanks // Bill
(Redhat Enterprise 3)

[Jeff-C]

On Redhat Enterprise 3 / cpanel 9.9.9 stable I can create tar.gz files of 9 GB or larger without problem, and so far I have not had problems ungizpping, untarring them.