[plug] tar file limitation ?

[Ryan]

On Wed, 2003-05-21 at 13:22, Craig Ringer wrote:
> > 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.

See also: http://www.suse.de/~aj/linux_lfs.html