Comment 4 for bug 977998

I ran into this as well with --stream=tar. I see xtrabackup 2.0 uses libarchive:archive_write_set_format_ustar - a format which is limited to 8GB files. If the archive error were reported by xtrabackup it would state something along the lines of:

archive_write_header: File size out of range

The pax (or restricted pax) format is likely to be more useful here as the pax format supports much larger files, but it will generate warnings with GNU tar:

# tar ztivf foo.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- root/root 264 2012-04-19 17:59:47 backup-my.cnf
tar: Ignoring unknown extended header keyword `SCHILY.dev'
tar: Ignoring unknown extended header keyword `SCHILY.ino'
tar: Ignoring unknown extended header keyword `SCHILY.nlink'
-rw-rw---- 0/0 2594177024 2012-04-19 17:18:19 ibdata1
...