rsyncing 79gb of data to 250gb drive

[David Maynard]

I would suspect that some of the source files are "sparse."  Ie. there are
"holes" in the middle of them where space hasn't been allocated in the
source directory.  Some applications that use random file access will create
sparse files.  A simple copy operation that doesn't look for sparse files
will fill in the holes, causing the copy to take up more space than the
original.

I haven't tried it (at least not recently), but rsync appears to have a
"--sparse" (-S) option.  Try using that in addition to -av and see if that
changes the results.  GNU tar has a similar option.

-dpm

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Mansour [mailto:micoots at yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 25, 2004 11:45 PM
To: fedora-list at redhat.com
Subject: rsyncing 79gb of data to 250gb drive


Hi,

I have an issue which I can't seem to figure out.

I bought a 250Gb Maxtor Maxline Plus ATA133 drive,
plugged it into a server, formatted it using:

# e2fsck -m 0 -j -b 1024 /dev/hdc1

I made the partition a Linux partition id 82.

After format, 241Gb free space is recognised.

I have 80Gb of data on another drive in the system
that I wish to backup onto this drive. So after
rsyncing the drives contents from the 79Gb (which is
on a stripe) to the maxtor 250Gb drive, the following
is the result:

/dev/md6              85419328  79573952   1506236 
99% /data01
/dev/hdc1            241201359 123508888 117692471 
52% /data02

123Gb used??? this is what is confusing me, why?

I first formatted this drive using 4096 block size and
got the result above, then I thought I'll reformat it
and change it to 1024 byte block size to try and get
back some space, the same result above.

I've also made sure (with tune2fs) that the "sparse"
option is turned on for the large filesystem.

I thought maybe the rsync was following symlinks
(which I'm sure there are none), but by default the
command:

rsync -av

won't do that. I checked for pipe and socket files
using find, and also couldn't see anything suspicious.

I'm at a loss to figure this one out and thought I'd
email here for some help.

Thanks.

Michael.

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