Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 19:36:10 -0500 From: Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com> To: Bruce Cran <bruce@cran.org.uk> Cc: John Almberg <jalmberg@identry.com>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: How big can a tar file get? Message-ID: <20090407003610.GG70541@dan.emsphone.com> In-Reply-To: <20090407005413.4c12d2b2@gluon.draftnet> References: <30D89A0A-A607-4513-AEA2-DB16A1609BDD@identry.com> <20090407005413.4c12d2b2@gluon.draftnet>
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In the last episode (Apr 07), Bruce Cran said: > On Mon, 6 Apr 2009 19:25:03 -0400 John Almberg <jalmberg@identry.com> wrote: > > Because of a big problem I had this weekend, I need to do an emergency > > backup. I'm basically just creating a tar file of my /home directory. > > > > My question: how big can a file get on FreeBSD? This tar.gz file is > > already 5G. Hard drive space is no problem, but as I'm watching this > > file grow, I'm wondering if there is some file size limit that is going > > to make this long backup abort. > > > > Naturally, that will happen when the backup is almost complete :-) > > With the default blocksize (16384) UFS2 can deal with files up to 128TB. > However traditional tar only supports up to 8GB while the newer ustar > format goes up to 64GB. It seems that at least on 7.x tar creates ustar > archives by default. I think you're referring to the maximum size of a file tar can store; the total size of a tarfile has no limit, since it's a streaming format. Each stored file is independant of previous or later files, and there is no summary file-list either in the front or at the end. -- Dan Nelson dnelson@allantgroup.com
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