Runaway .sparsimage sizes ... and iDisk problem?

[fatshark]

I've just noticed that the sparsimage file sizes being generated by SD! are significantly larger than the original data. I nightly backup my 'working drive' to a .dmg (on a second drive) using the standard scripts (Backup - all files). Just recently the .dmg files have jumped from ~35 Gb to over 100 Gb. I think this is similar to the runaway .sparsimage files discussed recently by Marco Polo in:

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/forums/s...ead.php?t=2770

Running 'Get Info' on my main drive today reports 642 Gb of 698 Gb free i.e. ~56Gb used, but the most recent SD! backup was 89.39 Gb despite the log reporting about 55 Gb being cloned.

| 06:07:53 PM | Info | Evaluated 700520 items occupying 54.98 GB (122785 directories, 543782 files, 33953 symlinks)
| 06:07:53 PM | Info | Copied 37310 items totaling 13.62 GB (617 directories, 2743 files, 33950 symlinks)
| 06:07:53 PM | Info | Cloned 54.65 GB of data in 686 seconds at an effective transfer rate of 81.57 MB/s

Needless to say, the enlarged .dmg files don't appear to contain anything more than I expect them to ... I can't find what's eating all the space up.

I've been using SD! happily for months and the only thing I can think of that's changed in the last couple of weeks is the addition iDisk synchronisation. Could this have messed things up? My iDisk is 10Gb (hence doesn't account for the 'missing' space) ... and appallingly slow ;-)

Many thanks
David

[dnanian]

Please see the discussion in the other thread, David. These images grow due to the way OSX handles them; they're not "runaway", nor can they grow larger than the source volume's size at the time of creation.

[fatshark]

OK thanks ... since the source is 750Gb I've some way to go. For those who have just reached this the best thread to follow is actually:

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2103

As Marco Polo claims, using 'hdiutil compact file.dmg' is slow - reclaiming ~40Gb from a 100Gb sparseimage took about 50 minutes.

David