[PLUG] Possible reasons why tarball creation would fail

[Rich Shepard]

   Prior to upgrading the OS version on my Dell E5410 laptop I tried to
backup everything in ~/ to a 2.7T external hard drive with 22M of data on
it. After deleting cruft from ~/ du -sh told me my home directory contained
40G of data.

   With /mnt/hd/caddis/ (the laptop's host name) as the pwd I entered the
command:
   tar czvf caddis-home-2016-09-24.tgz /home/rshepard/

The system churned away for a long time (I didn't time it, but it would have
been more than a coffee break in length) and finally exited with an error
message about exiting after prior errors occurred. Tried this again with the
same results.

   What might cause such a response?

Rich