How can I archive a 30 GB file?
I have a 30 GB zip file containing an archive of digital materials available in the school library that I want to burn to DVD. Of course, 30 Gb is far too large for a single DVD and the content is already zipped. I'm open to ideas, but leaning towards suggestions that will help me automatically spread the file over multiple DVDs, including a simple program to stitch it back together again later.
The easiest solution is probably to just split the file, then re-concatenate it before unpacking.
There are many file splitting programs available. On Linux/Unix, split -b will work fine; on Windows, see e.g. How to split large file on Windows? .
That said, this has the disadvantage that you need to get all the DVDs and re-concatenate the file on disk before you can read anything. Maybe another approach is better?
Options would be:
- put everything on a portable harddrive
- create a multi-volume zip archive
- zip parts of the data individually to create multiple smaller zip files
7-Zip on Windows supports spanning. Simply select "4480M - DVD" from the "Split to volumes, bytes" dropdown in the "Add to Archive" window.
You want Disc Spanning, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_spanning.
I haven't used this since my 3.5" disk days but it is still valid. The wiki article has links to a freeware and an open source program that will span DVDs.