[plug] tar file limitation ?

[Craig Ringer]

> Could anyone assist me do you know if tar has a file size limitation?

Tar doesn't, since its very happy with gigantic tapes and such, but the 
filesystem you're working on may well have a size limitation. A common 
size limit is 2 gigabytes for ext2/3 (except maybe newer ext3, I'm not 
sure) and older versions of reiserfs. In general, older linux versions 
will have a 2 gig file size limit, as will many other UNIXes - though 
not new-ish, decent-ish ones.

> I was
> using tar command do gzip server directories over an nfs link to create an
> automatic backup onto another hdd which I can then later at leisure transfer
> to dat tape. The server being backed up is a redhat 7.2 and the nfs server
> machine is running mandrake 9.1 I found that once the files hit 2.4gig they
> all failed? any ideas ? will updating  the tar version fix it ?

2.4gig - interesting. Is that 2.4gig of gzip-ed data, as reported by 
tar, perhaps? If so, that sounds right on the 2gig file size limitation. 
If you have a couple of gig lying around, see if a
	dd if=/dev/zero of=2gigtest bs=1M count=2100
succeeds or fails. If it fails, esp if it fails at 2048 blocks, you're 
running into a 2gig FS size limit.

However, if you have an actual on-disk file of 2.4gig at failure point - 
that's a weird one.

Craig Ringer