Thank you for the suggestion. Unfortunately, the image I wish to back up is the former contents of a 20 Gbyte reiserfs partition (of which 15 Gbytes were used). I don't believe that Win RAR will support reading a Linux reiserfs partition, nor do I expect it will handle things like symbolic links, device nodes, etc... But I'll check it out nonetheless. --wpd
How about using the Linux split command to split it up into smaller chunks (unless you want to succeed at your challenge to get it over onto one DVD, or have a need for it). Simply use: split -b 4096m bigfile.tar bigfile. This will split the file in 4096 meg chunks (4 gig chunks). The first file is your input file. The second is your output file. If you don't specify an output, it uses xaa, xab, xac, etc. Here I specified the same filename followed by a period. That way the resulting files are named bigfile.aa bigfile.ab, etc. To rebuilt it later, use cat bigfile.a[ab] > bigfile.tar If you end up with more than just aa and ab, then you'd want to modify that cat command to include all your files (i.e. bigfile.a[a-d]). I tested it out and did a md5sum of the original file, then a md5sum of the file that I split and re-assembled and they matched. So it works perfectly. Jacques B.
