How big can a tar file get?

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Apr 07), Bruce Cran said:
> 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.

I think you're referring to the maximum size of a file tar can store; the
total size of a tarfile has no limit, since it's a streaming format.  Each
stored file is independant of previous or later files, and there is no
summary file-list either in the front or at the end.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com