I had come up with this "cursed technique" a while back at work, when I needed to transfer a ~1GB file onto a quite old Linux machine that, for "security reasons" had USB mass storage access as well as the UDF kernel drivers disabled (and I was unable to access it over the network).
I've adapted the exact command to be more suitable for general use:
sudo chgrp -v "$(id -g)" /dev/sr0 # or whatever
tar c\
-ML716800\
--format=posix\
-f "${f=$(mktemp -t tar-XXXXXXX.iso)}"\
-F 'cdrecord -eject "$TAR_ARCHIVE" && read -p "Insert CD #${TAR_VOLUME}, CLOSE THE TRAY, then press Enter:"'\
$files
# Don't forget to run this afterwards
# to avoid leaving an 0.68G junk file laying around:
rm -v "$f" ; unset fThis will simply burn a tape-archive-formatted sequence of CD-Rs that can be extracted back onto most Unix systems with tar x -Mf "/dev/sr0". The files inside this archive may be a gigabyte or larger; it'll cause no problems. When extracting, tar will automatically prompt you to load the next "tape" when it reaches the end of a volume.
The flag -L716800 simply caps the archives at 716800KiB = 734003200 bytes = 700MiB (734MB)—the standard bare minimum that even the cheapest mass-market bulk vendor won't undershoot.
