Hi Andreas,
Thanks for responding.
I’m using Fedora v14 on my NFS system and I want to back up all my files,
upgrade it and reapply them (assuming I might lose them).
Every time I get to 4GB the tar command fails:
[vortexbox.localdomain backup]# ls -al
total 8388772
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 32768 Jan 1 21:21 .
drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 4096 Mar 4 2015 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 32768 Mar 4 2015 lost+found
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4294967295 Jan 1 23:02 test-01-01-2026.tar
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1359 Jan 1 23:02 testfile
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4294967295 Apr 2 2015 vmain15-04-02.tar.gz
bzip2: I/O or other error, bailing out. Possible reason follows.
bzip2: File too large
Input file = (stdin), output file = (stdout)
tar: test-01-01-2026.tar: Wrote only 8192 of 10240 bytes
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
Cheers.
Steve
From: Andreas Dilger <[email protected]>
Date: Saturday, 3 January 2026 at 01:17
To: Steve Bowes-Phipps <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Improvement Suggestion
Out of curiosity, since I wasn't aware of any 4 GB limitation on Linux, is this
for tar itself, or one of the tar sub-formats, or some filesystem you are using
on Linux?
Cheers, Andreas
On Jan 2, 2026, at 07:01, Steve Bowes-Phipps <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hi,
I can’t seem to find the answer I need online but is it possible to get tar to
backup to multiple files, so that I can circumvent the file size restriction on
Linux of 4GB?
Many thanks.
Steve
