Backing up to an external FAT32 disk

[Nils Kassube]

Liam Proven wrote:
> May I ask, though, why you don't use any of GNU tar's built-in
> multivolume backup functionality? This way, the only valid archive is
> the concatenation of all of them. If I were to lose one part, the
> whole set would be invalid. Using tar's own switches to segment the
> backup, each segment is a valid archive with its own header, so if I
> lose one chunk, I only lose the data in that segment - the rest would
> still be usable.

Good question. Well, a long time ago I tried to find out how to do it with 
tar alone. However, I couldn't make it work. The result was the workaround 
with the split command.

Of course, loosing one part would be a problem, but I don't think it is 
more likely to loose one of those multiple files than loosing the entire 
archive, which you had tried to create in your first approach.


Nils