[NBLUG/talk] Recovering data from a failing hard disk

[Lincoln Peters]

On Tue, 2004-08-24 at 17:18, mrp wrote:
> I wrote:
> > It's also possible that I was wrong about it knowing what to do with
> > sparse files (where the blocks used aren't continuous in the address
> > space of the file... pretty common with database files). 
> 
> Oops... turns out that there's now a '--sparse' option to cpio that
> wasn't there in SysV R3.2 (when I learned to use it.)  It takes blocks
> of nulls and treats them as unallocated blocks.

Well, it certainly wasn't a symlink issue; I just verified that the
symlinks copied properly.  And I'm sure that there were no hard links on
that filesystem.  It is most likely that the issue is a file being
sparse or not sparse.

Is there a simple way to make the files sparse, having already copied
them as non-sparse files?  Or do I even want to go there?

(A quick Google search turned up a few opinions that sparse files may be
harmful, possibly over-committing the resources of the filesystem, but
no simple way to convert non-sparse files into sparse files.)

---
Lincoln Peters
<sampln at sbcglobal.net>

I like work; it fascinates me; I can sit and look at it for hours.