What's The Limit

[Joe Smith]

Gene Poole wrote:
> ...  I tar gzipped the tree and it came to
> about 7.3 GB. So I started burning a dual-layer DVD for this file and
> that's when I learned that K3b (I use KDE for my desktop) won't copy a file
> larger than 4 GB.
> ...
> Does anyone know another way?  ...

There's no law that says the data on a CD or DVD has to be in a 
particular format (iso or udf, e.g.).

At least for CDs, I sometimes just skip making an iso containing only 
one big file (my backup.tar.gz) and just use cdrecord to write the tar 
file to the CD instead of a .iso.

I read them back with something like ``tar -xvzf /dev/cdrom''

I'm no CD/DVD guru, so this may be something really stupid, but so far 
they've all read back just fine. I don't see any reason it wouldn't work 
with a DVD as well.

Also, (GNU) tar can create multi-volume archives. Check the -M and -L 
options to create multiple tar file archives of limited size for writing 
to multiple CDs/DVDs.

<Joe