On Wed, 2004-05-26 at 11:42, David Maynard wrote:
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.
Actually, if you're trying to copy all the files from A to B, where B is
a Fresh directory, It's advisable to use GNU Tar. it'll speed up the
transfer and it'll ensure that permissions are kept as they should.
After tha Rsync them for incremental backup etc.
my 2 cents