Newsgroups:  gmane.linux.debian.user
Date:        Mon, 28 Aug 2006 20:48:34 -0400

> I tried to backup my whole partition with tar:
>
>   tar -cvzf /mnt/.../cache11.tgz .
>
> but when testing the archive result with
>
>  tar -tzf /mnt/.../cache11.tgz
>
> It ends with the following error, without explaining what's wrong:
>
> gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file
> tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
> tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
>
> I thought about it and think the reason might be that I'm backing up to
> a vfat volume, which might have some serious limits on file size (but
> unfortunately, that's my only backup option now).
>
> If so, how can I backup my nearly 20G partition using vfat volume?
>
> rar can do multi-volume but can it understand all the special Unix
> files, symlink, hard links, named pipes, dev, etc?
>
> tar can do multi-volume too, but "You should only type 'y' after you
> have changed the tape; otherwise tar will write over the volume it just
> finished.".

I've done multivolume backups onto disk with tar. There's an option to specify the output file — you need to specify this multiple times, once for each output file, and then it sequences through them. Make sure you have enough of them, though.

One trouble, though. When using multiple files like this, and specifying a max output size per file, it will not allow compression. At least it didn't lst time I tried it.

hendrik