On Wed, 19 Mar 2008, David Chinner wrote:

quoted text
> Yup - the use of a sparse file avoids the need for an internal map.
> But that does't really work for piping the output, though.
> xfs_metadump is probably more similar to bdar in that respect, but it
> doesn't copy data....

Ntfsclone also efficiently copies data or metadata to dense, mountable 
sparse or a device file since 2003. 

It was an important factor to get reliable NTFS write support sooner 
because NTFS is slightly bigger than the other file systems (the size of 
the Microsoft NTFS driver is almost like the sum of the 60 Linux file 
systems altogether) and we needed to handle the heavily used (meta)data 
images efficiently during development and quality assurance.

	Szaka

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