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A sparsebundle IS NOT a single file
Authored by: lowbatteries on Aug 07, '08 05:26:02PM

The "bundle" in sparsebundle lets you know that it's not a single file. Actually, its a whole bunch of 5MB files containing data, a few metadata/index files, all wrapped up in a bundle that Finder sees as one file.

This makes it much harder for it to be corrupted than say, a sparseimage file. It also makes it MUCH MUCH faster to sync two sparsebundles with rsync, unison, or other differential-backup utilites.



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Another advantage of many files
Authored by: lowbatteries on Aug 07, '08 05:32:18PM

Another advantage of a sparsebundle being many files, is it can be copied onto multiple hard drives in a pinch, or even file systems that don't support large files (like Windows FAT32 with its 4GB limit).

I also assume it improves the performance of image files on RAID and ZFS.



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A sparsebundle IS NOT a single file
Authored by: maikel on Aug 10, '08 11:08:10AM

Correct, yet in reality, alas my sparsebundles end up being corrupted nonetheless.

Your post did hint me to an approach I might still adopt; create the sparse bundle on the local HD and use time machine to keep that loaded with the latest backups, confining the space the sparsebundle eventually grows to by limiting the max size at the creation of it.

THEN using a scheduled rsync to copy the sparsebundle to the NAS, instead of writing to the NAS directly. THAT would indeed be much faster. (I was using a home grown rsync script prior to time machine that mounted/unmounted the NAS volume)

Needless to say, it's a waste of HD space on the local machine, may need to upgrade the good ol' iMac with a bigger one finally.



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