[Scottish] End of year BIG archive!

[Ben Thorp]

I looked at the GNU Tar manual at
http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_mono/tar.html - which is fairly
complete. The implication is that you cannot really do what you are asking
with tar. When you supply the M flag, it archives until it reaches the end
of the media, and then asks for another. Great for tape, not so useful for
CDs. However, I found on a mailing list post the following:

"If you specify several archive files, tar will use them in the
order given. Try something like this:

   tar -c -L 50000 -f archive1 -f archive2 -f archive3 ... path

Be sure to specify enough archive files to hold the entire data.

This method does work.  I recently used it in a backup script I
wrote that created multiple-volume archives.

You won't find this use of multiple -f options mentioned in the
man page, but it is in the info page.  (You have to hunt around
to find it, though--the GNU tar info page is poorly organized.)"

Hope that helps.

Ben Thorp




                                                                                                                                        
                      neil sinclair                                                                                                     
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                      23-12-03 10:13                                                                                                    
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Hi -
Season's greetings to all :-)

I'm doing a big file archive of my years' work, and I want to span it over
several CDs.

To date, I have used the command

tar -czPf /home/archive_file.tar.gz \
big \
file \
list \
which \
spans \
home \
directories \
for \
several \
users

which works fine for me. I save it as a shell script, and run it from time
to
time.

Now I want to expand the file list to include many more directories, and I
end
up with about 4 gig of tar file. Oops!

If I try to use Karchiver to split the file, it bombs out (I'm on SuSE 8.2,

using Karchver 3.1.1).

The man page for tar doesn't document how to use the -M switch for a
multivolume archive, so I'd like to ask if anyone has experience of using
it,
and how I can split my archive into 650Mb segments.

No doubt there is an easy way to do what I want, and i tried Karchiver to
do
this, but no success. If there's an easier way,  _please_  tell me how!!!

TIA,

Neil



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