Tar backup of a filesystem is much larger than the original due to sparse files in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

  • Creating a tarball of data over the network, created files which were higher in size than the source.

  • Backup of a filesystem was done over the network using tar and netcat. This was for a physical machine to virtual migration. The application filesystem was sized exactly the same on both, however, the data copied to the VM was much larger than the original.

  • The command used was as following :

# cd /; tar -cpf - `ls -a | egrep -v "^\.\$|^\.\.\$|proc|sys|lost\+found" ` | nc 192.168.5.40 9100

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6

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