On Sat, 2004-07-10 at 07:31, J.L. Coenders wrote: > Probably an easy question for you, but I am fiddling with it for hours and > can't seem to find out how to make a multi-volume tar file, which is > preferably also zipped. I think I am approaching it in the wrong way. > > with the command below I can make a multi-volume file, however it overwrites > the last volume with the next, and it isn't gzipped: > > tar -ML 650000 -cvf backup.tar * > > Any ideas how to solve this? > > Thanks, > - Jeroen > For gz use the -x option, bzip2 use the -j option, or after creating the tar file use gzip or bzip2 to do the compression. My version of tar does not allow compressed archives as multivolume, and it also prompts for an enter after each volume is created. Thus it is not totally hands free. Unless someone else can tell you different it appears that you would need to move the archive to a new name before you press enter, and then compress the archive after creating it. Or you can create one big archive and then split it into smaller pieces for storage. If this is being used for backups you might want to look at mondoarchive. It easily makes multiple compressed images ready for burning to cd of whatever size you specify.