Hi there,
On Sat, 5 Mar 2022, Les Mikesell wrote:
On Fri, Mar 4, 2022 G.W. Haywood via BackupPC-users wrote:
> Another possibility (and the only time I've ever seen this happen) is
> that there might be a large file which is causing a timeout. It was
> on a Linux box here, something went off the reservation and started
> writing gigabytes of messages to a file called '.xsession-errors'.
Unix/Linux has something calle 'sparse' files used by some types of
databases where you can seek far into a file and write without
using/allocating any space up to that point. The file as stored may
not be large but most tools to copy it will act as though the empty
parts were filled with nulls. Rsync might handle them these days but
may still take the time to send the stream of nulls. But in any case
they are rarely used on Windows.
I can't remember the last time I saw a sparse file used *anywhere* in
'real life', although they are occasionally found in malicious mail.
Apparently they're available on NTFS:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/sparse-files
so it might be another line worth investigating - but in any case,
that .xsession-errors file was just one great big ordinary file full
of garbage text messages about X. IIRC most of it was the same 30 or
40 lines repeated ad nauseam - and every second line said exactly the
same thing. :/
--
73,
Ged.
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