Re: [Mldonkey-users] oversized files blasts my diskcapacity!

[Goswin Brederlow]

Ben Gator <address@hidden> writes:

> Hey dear Dudes,
> 
> what the heck is this? My mldonkey runs smoothly on a 20 Gb HD and 
> uses ~ 17 Gb of data. 
> 
> Tried to copy the mldonkey directory to a new HD and ... it took over 
> three hours! On the new HD the temp directory in the mldonkey 
> directory had a size of 51 Gb data!
> 
> so on the old machine a "du -sh temp" did:
> 13G     temp
> and on the new one
> 51G     temp
> 
> I ve just copied it?! Is this some kind of magic trick? I mean the 
> original HD had a size of 20 Gb! How could copy 51 Gb of this?
> 
> Your help is really appreciated, because I m totally stuck on this 
> ... mystery. 

You didn't preserve the sparseness while copying. man cp:

       By  default,  sparse SOURCE files are detected by a crude heuristic and
       the corresponding DEST file is made sparse as well.  That is the behav-
       ior  selected  by  --sparse=auto.   Specify --sparse=always to create a
       sparse DEST file whenever  the  SOURCE  file  contains  a  long  enough
       sequence  of  zero  bytes.   Use  --sparse=never to inhibit creation of
       sparse files.

You also might want to keep temp on its own partition and run e2defrag
on it from time to time. (you need to delete and recreate the journal
if you have ext3 when using e2defrag).

MfG
        Goswin