[Nottingham] Tar backups

[Roger Light]

> Basically I'm trying to back up 6GB of data to an SMB mount (which is a
> NAS drive). As far as I know, because SMB is a Windows beast I can't
> simply copy all the files to the SMB mount because I'll lose the file
> attributes like permissions and uid/gid, so I figured tar everything up
> using the "p" switch.
>
> Fine, but tar appears to fail if the resulting archive >2GB :/

Sounds like you're running into the "large file" problem. This used to
be a problem, but should be fixed in all modern Linux distributions
and modern versions of tar. I found a good summary at Google Answers:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=25116

So, what version of Linux are you running, what version of tar and
what is the filesystem?

Cheers,

Roger