for some reason I can not tar more then 2 gigs. Anyone know a reason for this

tar: 75megs-backup.tar: Cannot write: File too large


there is enough space on the parition that I am writting too.

The ext2 (and some others) filesystem has a 2 gig filesize limit (max value of a 32 bit signed integer). You will need to use tar's -M option, for a multi-volume archive.

Why don't you try using cp to backup your data to another drive.

cp -pR /backup <directory you want to backup>

Or use rsync to backup to another server through the network.