One time deal: Backup of raid5 to set of removeable hard drives on another machine?

[Mitchell Laks <mlaks@verizon.net>]

Hi,

I have a (remotely stationed) server with a raid5 with about 630 GB of data 
that I would like to backup to a set of  removeable hard drives on another  
pc at the same location. 

I will use 250GB hard drives as removeables. Based upon experimentation with 
data I find that using tar zcvf I will get the size of the data stored to 
about 330GB of storage.

the removeable drive is mounted on /mnt/backup at 192.168.0.1. 

So I thought to do

tar zcf - directory|ssh backmeup@192.168.0.1 "cat >/mnt/backup/backup.tgz"

but that would be too big for the destination drive.

I thought of trying to use split at the destination side, but

 tar zcf - directory|ssh backmeup@192.168.0.1 "split -b \ 
230000m    /mnt/backup/backup"

but this wouldnt work either.
while this would appropriately split the target into 2 files, it would still 
run out of space and would not enable me to umount and remount the hard 
drive...

then maybe something like 
tar zcf - directory| split -b 23000m  | ssh backmeup@192.168.0.1 " cat 
> /mnt/backup/backup"

but that doesnt work

Is there a cool unix tool (or an idea for a perl script)  to use combined with 
split on the server side, that will then pause after split finishes creating 
the first file so that I can umount the first drive remotely and mount the  
second drive to receive the rest of the data?

I guess I could replace/recreate split on the server side 
as a perl script which would count the data as it sent it and stop sending 
when it got to 220G or so and then I could write a second script that would 
throw away the first 220Gb and start from there.

my $buff;
for (my $count = 0; $count < 220000000; $count++)  {
while (read(STDIN, $buff, 1024) {
print STDOUT , $buff;
}
}

I suppose I could calculate in advance a split of the directory into 2 roughly 
equal parts, but that would be less fun than having a way of splitting and 
then pausing...

Is there a better way?

Mitchell