...and I'm wondering if there is a utility (either windows or Linux) that will allow me to archive these files into one large archive that can be split into roughly 4GB or 8GB pieces (for DVD storage). In case you are wondering, the data is my Linux home directory.

Right now, I have the data on an external hard drive as my only backup, but since the drive technically isn't mine, that is only a temporary solution.

I've tried Uharc, but it maxes out at 2GB of data.

I'm wondering if there is a way to make a tarball or something similar that automatically splits itself into the sizes I want. Compression would be nice, but is not essential since I have plenty of DVD-R discs.

Many compression utilities will let you do that. WinRAR is the first one that comes to mind, but there are many, many others.

SourceForge also has a couple utilities that split files into smaller segments, though I havn't tried any of them so I can't comment on them.

yeah, you could do a spanning rar

rsync to amazon s3

TAR is what you want.

It's entire purpose was exactly for this, for splitting a large archive for tape backups originally. Check tar's manpage. You can then GZIP the archive pieces.

did you have to pay premium membership or do you know of a free archive? i need 19 gigs, although i'm only into golden showers & Cock n Ball torture

But then don't you have to guess somehow how much each section will compress?

Meh, you could start the uncompressed split at the maximum volume size. There'll be wasted space but still :p

Also, TAR does have options for compression. I'm not sure if it takes this into account while splitting but it's worth looking into.

Store it all on 8000 floppy disks. Problem solved.

You need at least 13,500 floppies.

7zip?

I was able to do it with Winrar.

The process took 6 hours to compress everything and required 3 DVD+R discs, (less than I thought it would take, since I wasn't using max compression).

Next time, I'll try TAR, since I prefer non-proprietary solutions whenever possible.

Thanks for the help, guys.

Tar with bzip2 compression + split would definately take compression into account.

I was told there would be no math.