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View Full Version : Feature request: compact destination image after backup

RobLewis
08-29-2009, 02:13 AM
When SD! does a Smart Update to a disk sparse image, disk space is not reclaimed when an old file is deleted from the image. So the image file keeps growing even if the source volume doesn't. (I've been backing up 80GB of data but my image file was up to almost 100GB.)

The terminal command
hdiutil compact /your/drive/image.sparseimage
can be used to reclaim this wasted space. But it takes quite a while to run, especially if your image file has a lot of this garbage in it.

It would be nice if SD! had an option to automatically run this command at the conclusion of a backup to a sparse image.
dnanian
08-29-2009, 08:14 AM
Perhaps use a sparse bundle instead, Rob? Added in v2.6...
sjk
08-29-2009, 04:35 PM
It would be nice if SD! had an option to automatically run this command at the conclusion of a backup to a sparse image.
Add my vote for sparse image/bundle compacting to be a built-in SD! option.

As Dave's post implies, compacting speed of sparse bundles is significantly faster. That's the main reason I switched to using them even before SD! 2.6 added direct support for them.