Backup up large tarball archive file: Better to split it, or leave it huge?

[Kwad Guy]

I have a tarball archive, about 55Gb gzipped. I am going to copy it over to a Windows Home Server for redundant (mirrored directory) backup...

My question: Should I leave it as one huge file, break it up into smaller chunks using "split" (say, 1gb each), or...?

And, yeah, I know I could squeeze a little more space out of that tar file with rar or 7zip, but it's only about 6% (I've tried), and that doesn't really affect the basic question...

Thanks.

 

[VirtualLarry]

When I use norton Ghost, I split my backup images into 690MB chunks, and then I burn a bunch to DVD, along with some PAR2 info.

 

[mfenn]

I have a tarball archive, about 55Gb gzipped. I am going to copy it over to a Windows Home Server for redundant (mirrored directory) backup...

My question: Should I leave it as one huge file, break it up into smaller chunks using "split" (say, 1gb each), or...?

And, yeah, I know I could squeeze a little more space out of that tar file with rar or 7zip, but it's only about 6% (I've tried), and that doesn't really affect the basic question...

Thanks.

I presume that you're worried about the connection dropping out? If this is a LAN (assuming because of WHS), then you don't really have to worry about that. It should only take about 90 minutes to transfer over 100Mbit anyway.

WHS does to its replication at the object level (read file level) so if you had a bunch of small hard drives, a single large file could be an issue. I doubt you built a WHS with 40GB drives though!

 

[Knavish]

If it's uncompressed, I'm pretty sure tar can recover from file errors. You might lose the specific file in the archive where the error happened, but you won't lose the rest of the archive. If you gz / 7z / bz the archive and then get a small error, you might lose the whole archive.

Are there any filesystem limitations for dealing with 55GB files? If there aren't, I guess it would be safe as one huge file.

 

[Absolution75]

Do what the scene does and split them into individual archives - I'd probably do 350MB files as two will fit on a standard CD (not that you'd ever backup 55GB of data on CD's. . . but you never konw). The point would be if you're transfering the files via a protocol that doesn't support resume, you won't have to start it over if you can't wait for the entire 55GB transfer.Also, if one gets corrupted in the transfer its not a big deal.