Tar Backups and Size Limits

[Steve Holmes]

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Hey, I'm trying to backup my linux system (home directories to a 200
GB external drive using tar.  It seems that there is an upper size
limit either due to the fat32 file system on this external drive or
tar.  I can't emagine tar having imposed any limits.  So I tried to
use -M multi-volume option and a -L limit of 4GB.  It got through the
first file seemingly ok and it put up the prompt to start the next
file.  Well, I figured tar would just go ahead and create the next
file with a different suffix or something.  Well, it appears that it
did not.  When I looked in another console I saw that the size of the
second archive started over as I would expect but it is actually the
original file.  In other words, I think the back procedure is
overlaying the first file.  The tar command I used is:
tar -cvf archive.tar -M -L 4000000 FILES...

I figured later I would do incremental backups against this tar file.
Am I missing something? If I reformatted my external drive as ext3 or
something, I could probably have done all this without size limits but
I also intend to use this same drive to backup my winblows boxes as
well.  This is a 200 GB drive with a pre configured VFAT single
partition.

Any ideas out there? Thanks.

- -- 
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