Ron Cordell wrote:

I'm trying to back up my home directory using the following command from the /home directory:

tar cvf /backup/rcordell.tar rcordell

tar gets most of the way through, then at the same place every time it stops with the error message:

Exit delayed due to error

I can't seem to find out why it is failing; it isn't lack of disk space or anything like that. Does anyone have an idea what might be happening? Is there a better method to backing up a branch of a directory tree?

Your home dir may be occupying more than 2GB of disk. Under the older version of reiserfs (3.5), that's a limit. I think ext2 will let you. try: du -s rcordell to check the size of your home dir. Try to compress the tar file on the fly with the z (gzip) or I (bzip2) option. Maybe is just a broken link. Look closely at the output of tar and locate what file is causing the error. -- Rafael