Talk:Sparse file

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If anyone would like to edit this page, more info can be found here. I think the information on that site is more clear to me (probably the illustrations helped a lot to make it clear to me, maybe someone could make an illustration... --Bernard François 17:43, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

I have always found sparse files to be more trouble than they are worth, personally. If you would like to see a defense of them (possible legitimate applications of them), try this link: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~thain/library/sparse.pdf Timothy Andux-Jones 15:39, 26 March 2007 (UTC) I removed the link to that PDF from the article because that's not the same kind of sparse file. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Chekholko (talk • contribs) 02:18, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

I believe the explanation here is very clear. One read and i knew what it was. By the way, sparse files are used on any Unix and linux (like in lastlog). Paul Cobbaut 20:20, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] More info

  1. What are sparse files good for?
  2. What is returned if one reads from a sparse area of a sparse file?

Thanks, --Abdull (talk) 21:13, 8 February 2008 (UTC)


[edit] Disadvantages Might be Criticisms

I had a little prod in Google to try to find a better method for detecting the sparse files. Nothing came up after three queries, I probably didn't have the right expression on my face at that moment. I imagine that it would be fairly easy to write such a program although that has nothing to do with Wikipedia of course. I know you were already thinking it, but hey it could be useful right?

Why could it be useful?

Welllllll to represent this in the article we would have to ditch the "advantages/disadvantages" and instead have "benefits/criticisms" or suchlike. Consider if you will rsync. Rsync and programs like it will flesh the file out to its full size before transferring it, which results in a lot of wasted bandwidth. Just a thought. These links may be of some use, although I doubt that they could be useful as sources per se: http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs-sparse.htm http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/openbsd-misc/2007/11/9/398477

I think that the whole idea of sparse files in and of itself smells a lot like filesystem compression. Definitely distinct but also probably related, no? Anyway I hope I am at least slightly helpful. Cheers. 125.236.211.165 (talk) 07:14, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Although it might seem similar to compression, the idea behind sparse files is not wasting disk bandwidth+space on non-data sections (zero-filled), while compression trades a comparatively huge amount of CPU resources for disk bandwidth+space on actual data sections. Jarfil (talk) 18:10, 20 May 2008 (UTC)