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how big an operation is this "hdiutil compact"?
- does it require extra temporary space, or does it shrink it "in place"?
- is it relatively quick, or is there a lot of bit-shuffling going on?
- does it really recover most of the empty space, or just part of it?
basically i'm trying to figure out if SD is right for me. i like almost everything i've read about it, but needing a lot of "extra" space on the backup partition or image might be a show-stopper for me. my external firewire drive is usually very tight on space - i do video editing, so i don't need to back up these files but i need the space for working. i can't afford a backup sparseimage with 50GB of wasted space (or even 10GB for that matter).
i love the idea of being able to quickly do a "smart backup" every day. but if this needs to be followed by a lengthy "compact" operation (or it often fails due to not enough extra space available, requiring a full backup instead), it seems to defeat the purpose. is it really practical?
am i better off repartitioning my external drive (i'm a bit nervous about doing that operation), making a backup partition about the same size as my internal drive? or will this also routinely fail due to not enough extra space?
thanks... <jeff
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