I have just completed installing CentOS 4.2 (I came over here from Fedora-Land (core-3)). I did this via a fresh install. I tar'd everything to an external drive reinstalled the new stuff and everything is working very well. I've just got one issue. I have a full system backup Backup.tar that has a size of 78,717,880,320. When I issue the command tar -xvf Backup.tar I get only about 111MB of data restored. Basically /root and a couple other odd things of little consequence. I did have a second backup made with cp -pR <stuff> <dest> so I've still got my all my stuff from which I can selectivly restore as needed but I'm wondering why tar didn't work? (While being very glad I made two backups.) Is there a max size limit to a tar file? A bug in tar? Curiosity plagues me. Thanks for any help.