Questions tagged [sparsefile]

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dphys-swapfile on btrfs volume fails

I have used dphys-swapfile with the default path of /var/swap and a 2048M swap file. However, since /var/swap is on a SD card, I wanted to move the swap file to a magnetic disk. So I ran sudo dphys-...
user149408's user avatar
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11 votes
1 answer
2k views

How can I remove holes in a sparse file on Linux?

How do I remove all holes in a sparse file on Linux? On Windows, I believe the procedure is fsutil sparse setflag <file> 0 What is the Linux equivalent? (I know cp <file> <file>.cp; ...
hanshenrik's user avatar
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1 answer
338 views

How to shrink sparse files in same way as rsync does in linux after copied them without "-S" operator?

I try to take a backup of a disk. I use rsync to backup files between disks. However, while used --delete option in rsync alone and then backup, destination disk is almost full while source not. By ...
Estatistics's user avatar
1 vote
0 answers
148 views

Is there a Windows equivalent to fallocate --punch-holes?

I'm looking for a way to punch holes in files on Windows such that the actual size-on-disk goes down, and the area that is punched gets deleted. Identical to the behavior of fallocate --punch-holes on ...
Daffy's user avatar
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0 answers
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How does my spinning HDD reach 320 MB/s?

While creating an image of a (mostly empty) 1TB spinning hard disk, I was expecting a read speed of around 120 MB/s, and on the first blocks it was like that, but after that, most of the time it was ...
golimar's user avatar
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0 votes
1 answer
501 views

How to re-sync already transfered sparse file with rsync?

I have completely transferred a file using rsync without the use of the --sparse, -S option. I don't want to waste space and thus re-sync the file and turn it into a sparse file. Is there a way to ...
Jotschi's user avatar
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1 answer
38 views

Can I somehow split one single file between drives? Windows

I want to split a bigger file (virtual machine disk) between my available drives. Is it possible? If so, how would one do it? Simple use case: In today's world, you may have many different drives in ...
Apache's user avatar
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2 votes
2 answers
1k views

Why can't I create sparse files on my NTFS partition under Linux?

I have a very large sparse file on an EXT4 partition, and I want to copy that file to an NTFS partition. The file has a size of about 2 TB, but since it is a sparse file it uses only 700 GB on disk. ...
oliver's user avatar
  • 500
3 votes
1 answer
379 views

How to compare huge sparse files efficiently?

There are two sparse files. They are proved identical by diff. But it took 20 minutes (too long time) to compare. I am thinking of taring them into tiny files to speed up the comparison. But they tar ...
midnite's user avatar
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0 votes
2 answers
229 views

How can I create a scenario to test zerofree?

What I am doing I am studying the filesystem image sparse tool: zerofree. I imagine the steps to create the scenario should be that: create a file system image. use some way to fill it. clear it, but ...
metaphor's user avatar
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169 views

Is it safe to interrupt when "fallocate --dig-holes" is running?

I use fallocate --dig-holes on very large disk images to make it sparse in-place. I'm worried that this operation may not be atomic. My questions are, Is my data guaranteed to be safe (holes are ...
zzh1996's user avatar
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0 answers
217 views

File NOT set as sparse but sparse attribute is seen set on windows explorer

There is a test file in windows machine where it is seen having sparse file attribute (P). But suing fsutil sparse queryflag says the file is not sparse. Even queryrange range says the same. This is ...
Aakash Chakravarthy's user avatar
6 votes
0 answers
310 views

Determining status of cloned file on APFS

Apple is now using APFS across several product lines, including macOS. This new filesystem has some nice features for minimizing how much actual disk space is consumed, such as sparse file support ...
petiepooo's user avatar
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0 answers
35 views

Compact transfer of partially empty blockdevice images for further compression

I like to do backups from a bunch of linux block devices on remote machines. Currently I am transferring the complete block device, albeit almost empty, to the backup machine and compress or ...
dronus's user avatar
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1 vote
1 answer
1k views

Looking for the best way to backup and restore a directory of sparse files

We have a directory of sparse files (du returns 240M for one of these files; ls returns 960M). When we copy one of these files over to S3, we end up uploading the entire 960M, and on downloading ...
Jedi's user avatar
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1 vote
1 answer
1k views

NTFS support on Linux, dealing with large sparse files, impact on performance

Background : I attempted to recover data from a failing HDD using ddrescue on a recent Knoppix environment. At first I stored the output to a NTFS partition, but at some point the copying rate ...
GabrielB's user avatar
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1 vote
2 answers
1k views

ddrescue, “size on disk” lower than total size, with possible impact on performance when writing to NTFS

The backstory is in my previous question and my own answer to it. At one moment I had two partial images created by ddrescue: one file on NTFS filesystem and the other on ext4. I had noticed quite ...
GabrielB's user avatar
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0 votes
1 answer
875 views

Why does unxz return this invalid argument error?

I'm using the command unxz on Linux (Ubuntu) to convert an .img.xz file to just an .img file. The command I'm entering is as follows: unxz kali-2017.01-rpi2.img.xz But it just returns this error: ...
Theo Addis's user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
640 views

Huge Docker file and `tar` behavior

When I did a backup on my Linux system with tar -czv, I noticed that the process is stuck very long at /var/lib/docker/devicemapper/devicemapper/data (way longer than a copy of all my images and ...
Milleu's user avatar
  • 43
21 votes
1 answer
24k views

Why didn't `dd conv=sparse` save space as I expected?

I was going to make an image of my old USB drive. I had good reasons to expect there were some blocks filled with zeros on the device, so to save some space I used conv=sparse option: dd if=/dev/sdb ...
Kamil Maciorowski's user avatar
0 votes
2 answers
737 views

How to remove sparsefile attribute

Answers to how to remove the sparsefile file attribute appear to revolve around: fsutil sparse setflag <filename> 0|1 This does not work for me. I am on Windows 7 Pro 32-bit NTFS, as an ...
EndUzr's user avatar
  • 101
2 votes
4 answers
4k views

How To Format A Disk Image To Be Recognized By MS-DOS?

I'm trying to emulate windows with bochs on my android device. I've got the following drives: an empty disk image to install windows on, a virtual vvfat drive with the setup files, and a cdrom drive ...
Jaïr Paalman's user avatar
1 vote
2 answers
1k views

How To Make A Sparse File On Android With Terminal

I'm trying to make a sparse file on android. For this I'm using Android Terminal Emulator. I have installed Busybox so I can use the dd command. Other commands like truncate aren't installed. My ...
Jaïr Paalman's user avatar
0 votes
0 answers
659 views

Sparse file performance on Windows with an SSD

Does anyone have any data or experience with sparse file performance on SSDs under Windows, with the NTFS filesystem? It seems like performance should be excellent since seek time is effectively zero,...
user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
392 views

How to access files on a zfs pool of which only the vdev is left?

I set up a zfs pool mypool with one sparse file as vdev. After a system crash only the undamaged vdev is left. Is there any chance to get files and folders out of it? I don't care to create another ...
Kalle Richter's user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
3k views

sparse file moving/copying over NFS

I created a sparse file with truncate -s 4T image.img on an ext4 file system which I mount over NFS. The following test shows that the system has trouble with the recognition of sparse files: both ...
Kalle Richter's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
10k views

Change sparse attribute from an .iso file on Windows 8.1

I have few very large .iso files in my computer altogether about 1TB. All of them are sparse files and i want to remove the sparse flag/attribute from them, is there a way how to do it? Maybe some ...
Ricsie's user avatar
  • 123
9 votes
4 answers
6k views

copy|move sparse files on NTFS with Windows

How can I copy or move a sparse file from one NTFS volume to another NTFS volume while maintaining the sparseness using the native tools included with Windows? If there is no way to do this with the ...
Michael Yasumoto's user avatar