Practical compression advice needed (and a samba mystery)

[Markus]

You could split the tar file like so: tar -cvzf - source_file | split -b 2000m - tarpiece-
and later glue them together with: cat tarpiece-* > filename.tar.gz

Though that techinicly won't make 2 gigs you need 2048m for 2 gigs.

Umm, yes. But I understood that he wanted <2GB splits.
Even though, if tearinghearout's solution to overcome the limitation works, all is well without needing to split.

I know, I just had to say that for some reason.

I'm not going to reason with that