Backing up to an external FAT32 disk

[Liam Proven]

On 12/07/07, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
> 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.
> ...
> > Friends have suggested using tar with -FL and a call to mktemp to
> > split the archive into randomly-named 4G chunks, but then I can't see
> > how I'd restore it again; how will tar work out what the next volume
> > to examine is?
> ...
> > I'm not wedded to using tar - I'd consider dump or something as well.
>
> kdar, using 'dar', has a very neat ability to slice its output into any size
> you want.  It's intended for archiving to CD/DVD, but I don't see why it
> wouldn't work with a 400G drive.  Of course, it's a KDE app...

Thanks! I've not heard of "dar" or "Kdar" before, but I am looking
into them now. Kdar itself looks not to have been updated in a while,
but dar is current. The server hosting the RAID has no GUI so the use
of a front-end is not important, anyway, though!

The CLI syntax of dar is dauntingly complex, but the docs on the
website are rather more explanatory.

-- 
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