Aggressive Compression?

[robwilkerson]

I have an external HD on which I store several SD sparsebundle backups. Two of these are "traditional" bootable backups and one is a relatively simple backup of media files stored on a different external HD. The 3rd file--the media backup--has grown to nearly 300GB (the full system, bootable backups run ~25GB each).

I've thrown `hdiutil compact /path/to/sparsebundle` at it, but that reclaimed very little space and subsequent attempts reclaim no additional space. Is there anything else I can do to get this file back to a reasonable size? I'd rather not delete and start over, but I can't think of anything else to try.

Thanks.

[dnanian]

You can delete it and allow it to be recreated.

[robwilkerson]

You can delete it and allow it to be recreated.

Damn. I was hoping for something less catastrophic. Alas.

[dnanian]

Well, it's managed by Apple's own tools. There's not much we can really do if they're not compressing it other than suggest the 'obvious'. But really, in general you shouldn't have less than the size of the source volume in free space when you're using an image.