H2 copy very large files to CD?

James Bond

Registered
I have some very large binary files (>2GB) that I want to copy to CD.

How can I split them into smaller chunks that will fit on a CD....which can later be joined back together again when/if needed?
 
How about (in Terminal, of course):

split -b 680m bigfile

This will result in some number of 680meg files called xaa, xab, xac...
To rejoin:

cat xaa xab xac ... > bigfile
 
...I'm using a split of 600m to leave some space on the CD so that it can write whatever it seems to need to finish the session. Also I copy a text file on the CD too that contains the orginal file name and how many components there are to re-constitute the original.

BUT.....if you loose any of the intermediate CDs or files for any reason the whole thing becomes lost.

From what I understand, gnutar is more clever when writing to tapes and floppy disks in that each tape/disk can be used on it's own......but this does not seem to work for CD. I have tried setting the "tape-length" to (say 600m) but get "invalid tape length".

Do you know how to do it with tar...or is there a better alternative for making CDs?
 
...I'm using a split of 600m to leave some space on the CD so that it can write whatever it seems to need to finish the session. Also I copy a text file on the CD too that contains the orginal file name and how many components there are to re-constitute the original.

BUT.....if you loose any of the intermediate CDs or files for any reason the whole thing becomes lost.

From what I understand, gnutar is more clever when writing to tapes and floppy disks in that each tape/disk can be used on it's own......but this does not seem to work for CD. I have tried setting the "tape-length" to (say 600m) but get "invalid tape length".

Do you know how to do it with tar...or is there a better alternative for making CDs?
 
gnutar could be a better solution, but I'm not sure of which options to use...I looked at the tape-length option you mentioned, and it seems to complain about any number used (I wonder if this is an interoperability bug with OS X?). Using --tape-length=1 or 10240 or 1000000000 all say invalid tape length. The only other thing I can think of is maybe gnutar is querying capabilities, so you need a real tape drive.
 
Back
Top