Feature request : dividing archive into several smaller archives

[theTrekman]

It would be nice to have the possibility to divide a backup archive into more archives which have a chosen size.
e.g. 512MB or so .... ;-) ... opening too big archives can be difficult depending on hardware.

System Details

• fwbackups version: 1.43.8-rc1
• OS name and version: Linux Mint 21.1 Cinnamon

[stewartadam]

Thanks for the suggestion!

To share some context on implementing this, fwbackups uses the tar CLI tool to generate archive files which generates a single output data stream. Packing files in a way that make them individually openable would difficult -- utilities like split are capable of segmenting the large files to assist with storage on older filesystem (like the 4GB limit on FAT32), however each segment would not be a viable archive on it own; it simply chunks the data stream and you'd have to re-assemble all the chunks to be able to open the archive again. We'd also need some way to index the files associated to each chunk so you could know which to open.

If folks need to store backups on older filesystems and would like to split the archives, please thumbs up this issue and I'll consider working on adding the capability to call split on the output data stream; but splitting into individually openable archives would likely require a large re-work of the whole backup system.