Fedora 14 is from 2010, so there are several possibilities for this limitation. It could be NFS (client or server), or your version of tar is not compiled with large file support by default? I don't think it is bzip, because there is an uncompressed .tar file at 4GiB as well as a GZip file at 4GiB.
You should try creating a plain file larger than 4GiB something like: dd if=/dev/zero of=test4G bs=4k count=1024 seek=1048575 That will write 4MB across the 4GiB boundary. It would probably be a good idea to upgrade, as there are so many security vulnerabilities in that old release it would be impossible to list them all here. Cheers, Andreas > On Jan 4, 2026, at 04:39, Steve Bowes-Phipps <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > 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
