Thank you Jim, Derek and Helmut for your replies. I thought the file
systems may be the problem which I was not clear about.
The Ext3 fs is on an internal HD, the dos FS is on a usb drive for the
purposes of compatability with an inferior box running an inferior
system. I have now run rsync in test mode between the major directories
and it returned no errors so I guess... all is well.
Thanks again,
Barry
........................................
On 01/03/16 15:38, Helmut Walle wrote:
On 1/03/2016 3:13 p.m., Barry wrote:
Probably a very basic question but it has me puzzled????
I have copied a directory with a dozen or so subdirectories and 4000+
files from an Ext3 filesystem to a Dos (fat32) filesystem on another
drive.
I then checked the properties of each and found that the number of
files and of sub-directories on each is identical, but the sizes in MiB
differs greatly, the dos one being over 5 times the size of the Ext3 one.
Is this because of the differing filesystems , or do I have to now
compare the individual files?
Hm, over 5 times the size... that's a lot... But in principle both ext3
and DOS / FAT allocate disk space only in multiples of their respective
block size, so that any file not fitting smoothly into a whole number of
blocks will occupy a certain number of full blocks, plus one less than
full block. If you have many small files (in the order of up to only a
few blocks each) you lose a greater percentage of space due to this.
Now the block sizes for ext3 and FAT are not fixed - they are
configurable within a certain range on creation of the file system, from
memory somewhere between 1 and 4 KiB.
If your FAT (DOS) FS has larger blocks than the ext3 then it will be
less efficient on average for small files. You won't notice this unless
you have a large number of small files, though...
Does that sufficiently explain the observed effect, or is there more to it?
Kind regards,
Helmut.
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