Large sparesebundle impractical (150gig) to backup/sync?

[Sean Dempsey]

I am making a 150gig sparsebundle which will be about half full, with more to add in the future. I plan to use Chronosync to backup this disk image to an external drive, but I am curious about the practicality of having a singular 150gig file, and if it will be able to be incrementally backed up, or if every time the backup runs, the entire 150gigs will have to be copied?

I know that the sparsebundle works by having smaller files comprise the entire image, but will programs like chronosync, superduper, carbon copy cloner, will they be able to only update the changed/added portions?

I can't imagine the wait every time you need to backup or mirror a single 150gig file. Does anyone have any experience with this and how it could be done easier?

 

[calderone]

Yes, they will be able to only update the changed portions.

You can test this out by doing an rsync of a sparsebundle. Sparsebundles are essentially "folders" and Apple created them to ensure efficiency for incremental backups (Time Machine).

As long as the software doing the backup is doing it incrementally and not doing a simple file copy/overwrite, it should handle your task efficiently.