Researching the multi volume tar, but I do not work for me
http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/Multi_002dVolume-Archives.html

$ vim new-volume.sh

#! /bin/bash
# For this script it’s advisable to use a shell, such as Bash,
# that supports a TAR_FD value greater than 9.

echo Preparing volume $TAR_VOLUME of $TAR_ARCHIVE.

name=`expr $TAR_ARCHIVE : ‘\(.*\)-.*’`
case $TAR_SUBCOMMAND in
-c) ;;
-d|-x|-t) test -r ${name:-$TAR_ARCHIVE}-$TAR_VOLUME || exit 1
;;
*) exit 1
esac

echo ${name:-$TAR_ARCHIVE}-$TAR_VOLUME >&$TAR_FD

$ chmod 755 new-volume.sh

$ tar -c -L650M -f cd-disk.tar -F new-volume Videos
tar: new-volume: Cannot exec: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: ‘new-volume’ command failed
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

This creates the first tar file named cd-disk.tar 650 MB correctly, but then throws an error and not continuous creaando the multivolume.

Some clue?, Thanks.

@Jesus,

Thanks for sharing your real life backup scenarios with us, to be fact I never use tar command, when my data is larger than 15GB, because it takes lots of time in compressing the data or moving from one location to another. So, I always use rsync tool and recommend anyone who want to make a larger backups and it’s easier to make a mirrors of folders in local or remote. If you still want to split the files, better user split command as shown:

# split -b 1024m file.tar.gz

Read more about split command man pages..

My favorite tools are Rsync to back up files without compressing them. Ever I made a tar 50GB and then failed on some point after trying to unzip.

And Tar uncompressed files to store long term and/or for divide them into DVDs.

I definitely like to avoid compression to the maximum, or limit the size of compressed files according to my need is for now, the maximum size of a DVD.

What are the most efficient ways to divide files into volumes ?, eg DVDs?

These are my favorite uses of tar
$ tar -cvf dvd-001.tar -ML 4480M –totals=SIGQUIT -C source

I failed to understand understood the script indicated in the documentation for an automatic Tar multivolume.

sir999

tar has a lot of option and is quite confusing too, at times. gunzip was a straight command. Moreover we mean to show the use of gunzip there.

Hope you understand.

# gunzip file_name.tar.gz

Can you not directly use this ->

# tar -zxvf file_name.tar.gz