I have a machine with Suse 10.0 running with raid 1. One of the disks died, and I wanted to backup the other disk before I installed the new disk to replace the old. Suse was working fine until I executed the tar command to backup the drive excluding /tmp, /proc, and one other I don't recall now. After a few hours, tar came back that it run out of disk space and could not continue and there was a command prompt, but the machine appeared to be locked up. I rebooted, and it would not boot. Got a new installation of suse on a new disk, mounted the /dev/md0 of the old working disk and could read the files, but properties showed it a 100% capacity. The disk is a 148GB and had 27.6 GB on it. Now I don't think it takes the 120GB to backup the 27.6GB, but I was trying to back it up wot a mounted USB drive. There were no files on it. I searched the md0 and found 5 tar.gz files in the /var directory of several hundred MB each. I deleted those 5 files, but it said there was still only 3.5MB free. I ran the ls -s command on all of the directories, and found nothing spectacular. I did get the necessary files recovered including a postgresql database and machine is back in operation now, but I would like to understand what happened. Why would tar cause the disk to go to 100% useage, which probably caused it not to boot, and how would I find out what is taking all of this space? Art