Is it possible to create tar/archives bigger than 2Gb.

[Rui Vilao]

Greetings,

I have a jobs that archives which exceed 2Gb...

If there a standard way to create archive files with more than 2Gb?

Any suggestion/hint is appreciated.

Thanks & Kind Regards,

Rui.

[Volker Borowski · Accepted solution]

No,

use GNU-tar or fbackup instead.

Hope this helps
Volker

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi:

If you want to tick with tar, the Gnu version is your best bet:

http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/hpux/Gnu/tar-1.13.25/

Fbackup is a good but HP-only alternative. If you must do lar archives and portability is a requirement then the Gnu version of tar is a good choice because it is available for a very large number of platforms.

Food for thought, Clay

[S.K. Chan]

Somewhere in /usr/share/doc/lg_files.txt it says ..

Some of the backup commands, specifically tar, cpio, pax (tar & cpio formats), and ftio (because it creates cpio format archives) are
restricted from supporting large files due to standards defined headers in the archives. Although the headers allow archival of files
upto 8GB, there is no guarantee that there will be no attempt to restore these files on a system that does not support large files. These commands will therefore support files up to 2GBonly. Attempts to archive any files >2GB will fail, and the files will not be added to the archive."

[harry d brown jr]

Rui,

Follow Volker's and Clay's advise: gnu tar...

And it will allow you to write to remote tape drives.

live free or die
harry

[Eric Ladner]

Also note that gnu tar has hooks built in to use compression in one step.

tar -czvf big_archive.tar.gz /some/directory

Produces a gzipped archive as output

Equivalent to this (which you can do with regular tar):

tar -cvf - /some/directory | gzip > big_archive.tar.gz

but with fewer steps.

You might want to consider using compression if you are not. Text files, for example, compress nicely. 2Gig of text would end up about 300 meg or so.