copy|move sparse files on NTFS with Windows

Solution 1:

You cannot do it with standard Windows tools.

But there is an utility. Go to http://www.flexhex.com/docs/articles/sparse-files.phtml, download and unpack sparse.zip.

Then run from from the command line:

cs.exe c:\src.dat d:\dest.dat

The file will be copied preserving sparseness.

Solution 2:

Use Cygwin and mount the filesystem with the sparse option. Then Unix commands that support sparse files, such as cp, dd conv=sparse, and rsync -S, will correctly create or copy the file as a sparse one. As one would expect, simple output redirection will not create a sparse file.

See the following demonstration.

$ mount -o sparse D: /tmp/mnt
mount: warning - /tmp/mnt does not exist.
$ cd /tmp/mnt
$ dd conv=sparse if=/dev/zero seek=10000 of=sparse count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
512 bytes copied, 0.0101909 s, 50.2 kB/s
$ ls -lh sparse
-rw-rw-r--+ 1 dds None 4.9M Sep  5 13:05 sparse
$ du -h sparse
0       sparse
$ cp sparse sparse-cp
$ dd conv=sparse if=sparse of=sparse-dd
10001+0 records in
10001+0 records out
5120512 bytes (5.1 MB, 4.9 MiB) copied, 0.0500354 s, 102 MB/s
$ rsync -S sparse sparse-rsync
$ cat sparse >sparse-fail-cat
$ cat sparse | dd conv=sparse of=sparse-cat-dd
$ ls -lh sparse*
-rw-rw-r--+ 1 dds None 4.9M Sep  5 13:05 sparse
-rw-rw-r--+ 1 dds None 4.9M Sep  5 13:15 sparse-cat-dd
-rw-rw-r--+ 1 dds None 4.9M Sep  5 13:06 sparse-cp
-rw-rw-r--+ 1 dds None 4.9M Sep  5 13:11 sparse-dd
-rw-rw-r--+ 1 dds None 4.9M Sep  5 13:19 sparse-fail-cat
----rw----+ 1 dds None 4.9M Sep  5 13:06 sparse-rsync
$ du -h sparse*
0       sparse
0       sparse-cat-dd
0       sparse-cp
0       sparse-dd
4.9M    sparse-fail-cat
0       sparse-rsync