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

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