In computer science, a sparse file is a type of computer file that attempts to use file system space more efficiently when the file itself is partially empty. This is achieved by writing brief information (metadata) representing the empty blocks to the data storage media instead of the actual "empty" space which makes up the block, thus consuming less storage space. The full block is written to the media as the actual size only when the block contains "real" (non-empty) data.
Most commonly, sparse files are created when blocks of the file are never written to. This is typical for random-access files like databases. Some operating systems or utilities go further by "sparsifying" files when writing or copying them: if a block contains only null bytes, it is not written to storage but rather marked as empty.
When reading sparse files, the file system transparently converts metadata representing empty blocks into "real" blocks filled with null bytes at runtime. The application is unaware of this conversion.
Most modern file systems support sparse files, including most Unix variants and NTFS.[1] Apple's HFS+ does not provide support for sparse files, but in OS X, the virtual file system layer supports storing them in any supported file system, including HFS+.[citation needed] Apple File System (APFS) also supports them.[2] Sparse files are commonly used for disk images, database snapshots, log files and in scientific applications.
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Giampaolo, Dominic (1999). Practical File System Design with the Be File System(PDF). Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. ISBN 9781558604971.
^"Apple File System Guide". Apple's Developer Site. Apple Inc. Retrieved 27 April 2017.
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for generating qcow2 files to avoid the use of sparsefile support. One of the main characteristics of qcow disk images is that files with this format can...
and prints the contents of the last login log file, /var/log/lastlog (which is a usually a very sparsefile), including the login name, port, and last login...
link. Offline (O): The file data is physically moved to offline storage (Remote Storage). Sparse (P): The file is a sparsefile, i.e., its contents are...
for reverse-path forwarding.: 56–57 There are four variants of PIM: PIM Sparse Mode (PIM-SM) explicitly builds unidirectional shared trees rooted at a...
external descriptor file, while others embed it with the main data in a single file. A flat image allocates space ahead of time while a sparse image grows as...
and file timestamps Support for Symbolic links and device files Deeper directory hierarchy (more than 8 levels) Efficient storage of sparsefiles The...
features including: server-side clone and copy, application I/O advise, sparsefiles, space reservation, application data block (ADB), labeled NFS with sec_label...
allowing both original and converted file systems to be accessed at the same time. Deleting this sparsefile frees up the space and makes the conversion...
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disk quotas (provided by QuotaAdvisor), file-system-level encryption, sparsefiles and reparse points. Sparsefiles allow for the efficient storage of data...
sectors on the volume. Sparsefiles can be larger than the file system size, even though they can't contain more data. NSS allows files to have multiple names...
Desktop entry on Linux Desktop environments Harwell-Boeing – a file format designed to store sparse matrices MML – MathML – Mathematical Markup Language ODF...
startup volume. The operating system uses an encrypted sparse disk image (a large single file) to present a volume for the home directory. Mac OS X 10...
the file will be written in a contiguous group of blocks, reducing fragmentation problems and increasing performance. XFS provides a 64-bit sparse address...
utility which performs in-place conversion between any two file systems with sparsefile support Gentoo Forum Link – Discussion on ReiserFS fragmentation...
M 12/Tiber (1945) – Italy, political and military liaison mission; a sparsefile suggests activity in Liguria and Genoa. Macduff (1943) – Belgium, May...
to clarify and remove ambiguity. It also added support for sparsefiles; persistent file identifiers; virtual extended attributes for filesystem metadata...
introduced support for dynamic (sparsefile) volumes. 4.3 March 19, 2007 Added support for Windows Vista, support for file systems using sector sizes other...