tar fills up my HDD

Question

I'm trying to tar a pretty big folder (~11GB) and while taring, my VM crashes because its disk is full. But... I still have plenty of room available on all disks but /

$ sudo df -h
File system        Size    Used    Avail. Used% Mount on
udev               3,9G       0  3,9G   0% /dev
tmpfs              799M    9,3M  790M   2% /run
/dev/sda1          9,1G    3,1G  5,6G  36% /
/dev/sda2           69G     37G   29G  57% /home
/dev/sdb1          197G     87G  100G  47% /docker

I assume tar is buffering somewhere on / and fulfil it before my OS crashes. By the way, I have no idea on how to prevent this. Do you guy have any idea?

Cheers, Olivier

Answer 1

Tar normally builds the archive in the current directory, as a hidden file. Try cd'ing to one of your larger partition mounting points and taring from there to see if it makes a difference. You may also be running out of innodes:

No Space Left on Device, Running out of Innodes

I ran into a similar problem with a server because of too many small files. While you have plenty of free space left, you might run into this issue.