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My main drive (D:) has 500GB capacity. I also have two backup drives (both 250GB capacity).

I want to back up the contents of the 500GB drive and spread it across the two 250GB drives.

7-zip allows to store in .tar files and create multiple part files (example: 38 x 10GB .tar files = 380GB total). The problem is that it can only write the files to ONE drive. While one drive has too little space.

Is there some other tool (CLI maybe) that allows to write to one disk till it's full and then switch to the next drive?

FYI: a spanned volume is not an option. I require BitLocker which is incompatible with dynamic volumes (e.g. spanned, striped).

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  • I think WinRAR (GUI version) has the feature to create split archives directly to the limited drive. Originally this feature was designed for removeable drives, but as far as I remember when one disk is full it opens a dialog where you can change the path. But I haven't used that for quite a while. Don't know if it works still this way.
    – Robert
    Feb 23, 2022 at 21:27
  • @Robert indeed I tried this, and WinRAR does ask this. I don't like using WinRAR so I opted for another solution. Sadly 7-zip does not ask this (which I would of liked using much more).
    – degebine
    Feb 25, 2022 at 17:43

1 Answer 1

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A program called DAR (Disk ARchiver) has the option to pause -p every "slice":

dar -c "/cygdrive/i/Library" -R "/cygdrive/d/" -s 222G -p

So I set the slice size to 222GB: -s 222g. After it creates the first slice I go to Window's disk management and change drive letters around so that the next drive get's the drive letter that the starting drive had.

Then I press continue.

To restore I can then just create a symlink for the second slice.

mklink E:\Library.2.dar F:\Library.2.dar

Restore command is as follows:

dar -x "/cygdrive/e/Library"  -R "/cygdrive/c/Users/.../..." -O -v

Bit of a hassle really, but works out okay.

DAR also can do differential back-ups. Which I might explore in the future.

-R is destination for both creating archives and restoring them. -c creates an archive. -x extracts an archive. /cygdrive/<drive_letter> is some workaround for windows based filesystems (since tool is orginally for linux).

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