Copying a 1TB sparse file

Question

I got a sparse file of 1TB which stores actually 32MB data on Linux.

Is it possible to \"efficiently\" make a package to store the sparse file? The package should be

Answer 1

Short answer: Use bsdtar or GNU tar (version 1.29 or later) to create archives, and GNU tar (version 1.26 or later) to extract them on another box.

Long answer: There are some requirements for this to work.

First, Linux must be at least kernel 3.1 (Ubuntu 12.04 or later would do), so it supports SEEK_HOLE functionality.

Then, you need tar utility that can support this syscall. GNU tar supports it since version 1.29 (released on 2016/05/16, it should be present by default since Ubuntu 18.04), or bsdtar since version 3.0.4 (available since Ubuntu 12.04) - install it using sudo apt-get install bsdtar.

While bsdtar (which uses libarchive) is awesome, unfortunately, it is not very smart when it comes to untarring - it stupidly requires to have at least as much free space on target drive as untarred file size, without regard to holes. GNU tar will untar such sparse archives efficiently and will not check this condition.

This is log from Ubuntu 12.10 (Linux kernel 3.5):

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=1tb seek=1T bs=1 count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
1 byte (1 B) copied, 0.000143113 s, 7.0 kB/s

$ time bsdtar cvfz sparse.tar.gz 1tb 
a 1tb

real    0m0.362s
user    0m0.336s
sys 0m0.020s

# Or, use gnu tar if version is later than 1.29:
$ time tar cSvfz sparse-gnutar.tar.gz 1tb
1tb

real    0m0.005s
user    0m0.006s
sys 0m0.000s

$ ls -l
-rw-rw-r-- 1 autouser autouser 1099511627777 Nov  7 01:43 1tb
-rw-rw-r-- 1 autouser autouser           257 Nov  7 01:43 sparse.tar.gz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 autouser autouser           134 Nov  7 01:43 sparse-gnutar.tar.gz
$

Like I said above, unfortunately, untarring with bsdtar will not work unless you have 1TB free space. However, any version of GNU tar works just fine to untar such sparse.tar:

$ rm 1tb 
$ time tar -xvSf sparse.tar.gz 
1tb

real    0m0.031s
user    0m0.016s
sys 0m0.016s
$ ls -l
total 8
-rw-rw-r-- 1 autouser autouser 1099511627777 Nov  7 01:43 1tb
-rw-rw-r-- 1 autouser autouser           257 Nov  7 01:43 sparse.tar.gz