The Split Extension is a Cedar Backup extension used to split up large files within staging directories. It is probably only useful in combination with the cback-span command, which requires individual files within staging directories to each be smaller than a single disc.

You would normally run this action immediately after the standard stage action, but you could also choose to run it by hand immediately before running cback-span.

The split extension uses the standard UNIX split tool to split the large files up. This tool simply splits the files on bite-size boundaries. It has no knowledge of file formats.

Note: this means that in order to recover the data in your original large file, you must have every file that the original file was split into. Think carefully about whether this is what you want. It doesn't sound like a huge limitation. However, cback-span might put an indivdual file on any disc in a set — the files split from one larger file will not necessarily be together. That means you will probably need every disc in your backup set in order to recover any data from the backup set.

To enable this extension, add the following section to the Cedar Backup configuration file:

<extensions> 
   <action>
      <name>split</name>
      <module>CedarBackup2.extend.split</module>
      <function>executeAction</function>
      <index>299</index>
   </action>
</extensions>
      

This extension relies on the options and staging configuration sections in the standard Cedar Backup configuration file, and then also requires its own split configuration section. This is an example Split configuration section:

<split>
   <size_limit>250 MB</size_limit>
   <split_size>100 MB</split_size>
</split>
      

The following elements are part of the Split configuration section: