Is the --sparse option suitable for .dbf files

Kevin Korb kmk at sanitarium.net
Wed Sep 5 10:31:57 MDT 2012


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Essentially, a sparse file is a file that is stored sparsely meaning
that any long string of nulls that happens to be on a filesystem block
will not actually be allocated by the filesystem so you don't have to
store that block of nothing.  When you read such a file you get nulls
but they aren't actually read from disk.  If you ever write something
to that part of the file the file size will not change but it will
occupy more disk space.

The only reason it doesn't work with grub is that grub is not using
the kernel to access the filesystem.  It is using a very stripped down
filesystem module that is usually good enough to figure out which disk
sectors to load a kernel from but it can't handle sparseness.  Pretty
much everything else won't know the difference.

Also, this is during a restore that I am talking about.  I don't see a
problem with using --sparse on everything during the backup.

On 09/05/12 12:25, Dariusz Dolecki wrote:
> Please let me know
> 
> 

- -- 
~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~
	Kevin Korb			Phone:    (407) 252-6853
	Systems Administrator		Internet:
	FutureQuest, Inc.		Kevin at FutureQuest.net  (work)
	Orlando, Florida		kmk at sanitarium.net (personal)
	Web page:			http://www.sanitarium.net/
	PGP public key available on web site.
~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2.0.19 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

iEYEARECAAYFAlBHfn0ACgkQVKC1jlbQAQehxwCg4aqHiTci7IroZcHGh4dYCo/Z
+qoAoNcrgabuaXYjc4vg2KLOpD42NUJ6
=d36y
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


More information about the rsync mailing list