What is the fastest and most reliable way to split a 50GB binary file into chunks of 5GB or less, and then reassemble it later?

Solution 1:

To split, split -b

To join, just cat.

AFAIK they are completely reliable, and I doubt there is something more efficient.

split is very reliable. We use it for porting large log files, and it worked well for up to a couple of GBs ( not 50 gb anyway ).

I believe you can try using the split for your requirement, and let us know.

Split into 5GB files

split --bytes=5G inputfile

It will split into multiple files of 5GB and name it as xaa, xab, xac, .... and so on.

Concatenate

cat x* > outfile

by this you can concatenate as single file in the other end.