> rsync can handle sparse files by using the -S (--sparse) option. > However, it can take longer as it's doing a bunch of processing
> instead of blindly sending everything over the wire. You are trading > off bandwidth use for CPU use. On a local network, this tradeoff may > not be worth it. Personally I use rsync on the local network since it > also gives me that ability to resume, preserve ownership, etc... That's the problem. When I used rsync to backup the files, the incremental took over 2x longer than the initial. Why would anybody ever do an incremental in that case? The goal is to do incrementals, and minimize the blocks sent, down to something in the vicinity of the number of blocks changed. And to do this in a length of time which is reasonably short, so you're comfortable doing it frequently. > Have you looked into piping your backups through gzip? Any sparse file > would get compressed down to almost nothing, though it also might take > a little more time. Yes, I've done this, and you're right it does compress all the serial 0's down to essentially zero size. However, you're still sending the whole file, not just a subset of changed blocks. So it still takes the time of a full backup, not just an incremental.
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