How to store a large folder in a single file without compression

Use tar: tar -cf my_big_folder.tar /my/big/folder

Restore the archive with tar -xf my_big_folder.tar -C /

-C will change to the root directory to restore your archive since the archive created above contains absolute paths.

EDIT: Due to the relatively big size of the archive, it'd be best to send it [directly] to its final location, using SSH or a mount point of the cloud resource/folder. For example, as Cole Johnson suggests :

tar -cf /network/mount/point/my_big_folder.tar /my/big/folder

or

tar -c /my/big/folder | ssh example.com "cat > my_big_folder.tar"

EDIT: As Blacklight Shining also suggests, If you want to avoid absolute paths, you can change to the big folder's parent and tar from there:

tar -cf /network/mount/point/my_big_folder.tar \
    -C /my/big/folder/location the_big_folder

or

tar -cC /my/big/folder/location the_big_folder | \
ssh example.com "cat > my_big_folder.tar"

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Personal reflexions

Whether to include relative or absolute paths is a matter of personal preference.

There are cases absolute paths are obvious, e.g. for a restore in a disaster recovery situation. For local projects or collections it's common to archive a directory tree from the desired folder's parent so as to avoid cluttering the current directory, in case the archive is accidentally unpacked in-place. If big_folder lies somewhere deep in a standard *NIX hierarchy, it may make some sense to start archiving the first non-standard folder where big_folder deviates from and its directory tree from there.

Finally — going pedantic here — tar archive members are always relative since a) they may be restored in any directory and b) tar removes the leading / when creating an archive. I personally tend to always use -C when unpacking an archive.

Alternative: cpio

(cd /my/big/folder && find . -depth -print0 | cpio -0o > myfolder.cpio)

Unpacking to current directory:

cpio -id < myfolder.cpio

Caveats:

• If use find /my/big/folder instead of cd, the archive will contain full paths and extraction will try to follow them;
• Big files (> 2GB) may be a problem;