[plug] tar and multi-volume archives

[Brad Campbell]

G'day all,

I want to back up my raid array before I let raidreconf loose on it.
To do this I have 8 200gb hard disks, a firewire external enclosure and pci firewire card.

I had planned to use tar with its multi-volume support and just point the destination at /dev/sda, 
not using any format on the disks. In theory, tar should fill the first disk and then ask me to 
replace it, so I just unplug the firewire, swap the drive, plug it back in and lather-rinse-repeat.

Has anyone experience in doing something similar? I'm currently backing up 1.4 TB and I expect the 
process to take about 29 hours based on average transfer rates.

If anyone is interested, I'm in the process of adding raid6 support and also journalling to allow 
resume after power failure to raidreconf.

Regards,
Brad