backup of old Mac, but tar says: Error exit delayed from previous errors

Question

I try to backup an old Mac OS X Tiger 10.4 before upgrading it to 10.6. All the files to be backed up are located within the /Users/Johndoe folder.

cd /tmp
sudo tar cvpf backup.tar /Users/Johndoe

However the tar command aborts the operation and says:

tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

The homedir is about 30 Gb and there is about 100 Gb available space. I see no errors in the console output.

How can I backup this old Mac? Should I use something else than tar?

Answer 1

This worked for me. I did not see any errors.

sudo cp -R -p -v /Users/Johndoe /Volumes/MyExternalBackupDisk/BackupJohndoe