How big can a tar file get?

[Bruce Cran]

On Mon, 6 Apr 2009 19:25:03 -0400
John Almberg <jalmberg at 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.

-- 
Bruce Cran