On Fri, Nov 09, 2007 at 11:03:31AM +0100, Otto Moerbeek wrote: > So your problem seems to be that rsync -S is inefficient to the point > where it is not useable. I do not use rsync a lot, so I do not know > if there's a solution to that problem. It does seem strange that a > feature to solve a problem actually make the problem worse.
Anything is inefficient in that case. Just create a huge dummy file: $ dd if=/dev/null seek=1m bs=1m of=file Then copy it (with cp, or any sparse-file aware program) to another filesystem. Watch how much time and power it takes to copy nothing from one place to another. Any way to obtain a 'map' of the file that tell you exactly where the written sectors are would make for a BIG improvement. You can't do that on OpenBSD without raw low-level fs hacks and reinventing half of dump(8) and fsck(8). Adi
