[rdiff-backup-users] Weirdness with filesizes before and after backup.

[Alan Horn]

Hi,

Local first time backup of several filesystems, some ext3, some reiserfs.
Most of the data was on a reiserfs /home partition.

43GB of data backed up resulting in 63GB of data in /backup. No data was
on that partition before the backup ran.

Looking at certain files (coredumps actually.. I forgot to exclude that
pattern :) I see this :

Original file

17932 -rw-------    1 mysql    1002     329052160 Sep 24 23:21 core.26540

Backed up file

321340 -rw-------    1 mysql    1002     329052160 Sep 24 23:21 core.26540

So this may be a sparse file issue of some kind, or perhaps something else
entirely.

I gather from searching the web that sparse files are an issue with
rdiff-backup. In my case however it increases my backups substantially
(although I'm investigating alternatives to see if there ways to mitigate
this).

Are there any plans to implement something similar to the rsync --sparse
option ? I don't know how portable it is, but surely it would be good to
have in places where it's usable ?

Let me know.

Cheers,

Al