[PLUG] 2 TAR questions

[guy1656]

Greetings:

1st - a great 'Thanks' to all those folks who helped me resurrect an ancient 
233MHz, 128MB RAM ATX 'puter at the clinic yesterday. One of the things I 
love about Linux is that it extends the useful lifespan of older machines 
like this - which means on the whole, we get to use machines longer - thereby 
saving money and materials. (Kinda like the longer you can keep your car, the 
less iron needs to be mined and smelted in the world ... sort of ...)

Anyways, thanks to all. It was really satisfying to go through these installs 
and learn a bit more about what's going on. Several folks had a number of 
handy tips & tricks, and pitched to help in when things hung up.

It is running Mandrake 7.0 with no GUI. I am using it as a backup machine on a 
home network. It has 3 hard drives - one for the OS [20GB] another oldie just 
for workspace [1.2GB] and the third, which I want to use to store tar.gz 
backups of home directories made from/of the other computers' 
/home/[username] directories [30GB.]

Now on to my question: When I go

tar -cvpzf /mnt/[somewhere else]/[backup filename].tar.gz * 

in a users home directory on one of these other machines, I get a backup file 
about 5 to 7 GB in that other [somewhere else] directory when it's done. But 
evidently, the little old ATX doesn't like receiving files larger than 2GB.

SO, the question: What is a best/most proper way to create a number of backup 
files that split up into a number of <=2GB files. For example, is there a way 
to carve up a 5 GB tar.gz file into 'filename-1.tar.gz,' 'filename-2.tar.gz,'  
and 'filename-3.tar.gz,' of around 2GB, 2GB and 1GB respectively.

Or is there another, more elegant solution which we're all supposed to know 
about? ("This is how that problem is usually solved in industry, so if some 
one needs to maintain your machine, they'll look at these 3 files and have a 
very good idea of what you did and why ...)

Thanking all for advice & suggestions,

GLL
(getting less lame about this stuff by the season)