rsync mystery

[Kenneth Loafman]

On Mon, 19 May 2008 16:55:16 -0600, Karl Larsen wrote:

> I have backed up this system to my second hard drive but there is a
> strange problem. Yesterday I found a problem and now this computer is
> running in just 2894892000 bytes. I just backed it up and the size of
> the backup is at least 3549580000 bytes.
> 
>     Does anyone know why a backup is larger than the original??

Please tell us what the filesystems are on the source and the target.

Are the majority of the files small?

The difference could be, for example, that you're backing up to a Windows 
filesystem with a 32k or 64k cluster size (large filesystem).  This means 
that either 16k or 32k is unused per file, on average.  If the files are 
mostly smaller than the cluster size, even more space could be unused.

...Ken