Tar Backups and Size Limits

[Allan Shaw]

Fat16 which is the original DOS file format has a 2 GB limit, Fat32 which 
came with Win9X can address much larger drives but I'm not sure if a 200 GB 
drive is outside its limits nor if Linix will recognize Fat32.
You'll encounter similar problems under Windoes since not all file formats 
are recognized by all operating systems for example, home versions 
recognize Fat16 and Fat32 not NTFS, Professional versions recognize Fat16 
and NTFS not Fat32 however this has changed some what under XP.



  At 03:24 11/7/04, you wrote:
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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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