On Sun, Nov 11, 2007 at 09:18:34PM +0100, knitti wrote: > if I'm not completely wrong, you could always tar -czf the sparse file, scp > the > archive and then tar -xzf the file in place in the other side. this should > also > create a new sparse file. of course, you lose the rsyncabilty and you have to > identify your sparse file in advance. But 16GB of nothing should compress > very well ;)
I tried making a very sparse file (100 MB data, 1000 GB sparseness) and gave up trying to compress it. gzip has to process the whole thing, sparseness and all. Sure it would probably end up with a very small file, but the whole thing has to be processed. I imagine that its no less time than that which rsync takes to process. Rsync takes lots of time and computation but saves on bandwidth. Doug.
