Backing up to an external FAT32 disk

[Nils Kassube]

Liam Proven wrote:
> I am trying to backup a 98% full RAID array (some 100GB of stuff) onto
> a 400GB FAT32 USB2 external hard drive. I don't have space on the RAID
> itself to create the archive, nor on my 3G root FS.
>
> I tried (in my /media directory, the mountpoint for both the RAID and
> the USB drive):
>
> tar -cvf usbdrive/raid.tar raid/
>
> This worked but I forgot one detail. FAT32 has a max file size of
> about 4G. So when the archive got to 4G, it barfed.

Try this:

tar c raid | split -d --suffix-length=3 --bytes=1000m - usbdrive/raid_

That will give you files of 1000MB size with filenames usbdrive/raid_<nnn> 
with <nnn> being numbers counting from 001.

You can test the archive with:

cat usbdrive/raid_* | tar tv

And you can restore a file with:

cat usbdrive/raid_* | tar x <filename>


Nils