How big can a tar file get?

[John Almberg]

Because of a big problem I had this weekend, I need to do an  
emergency backup. I'm basically just creating a tar file of my /home  
directory.

My question: how big can a file get on FreeBSD? This tar.gz file is  
already 5G. Hard drive space is no problem, but as I'm watching this  
file grow, I'm wondering if there is some file size limit that is  
going to make this long backup abort.

Naturally, that will happen when the backup is almost complete :-)

-- John