I have no idea if this applies to your current situation:

Back in the misty past of the unix world
it was possible to have a file that contained empty spaces.
When a person would then copy that file, the resulting
file would be smaller.

I believe there was a terminology for this kind of
hollow file.  But I don't remember what it was
and google is not helping so far.

Such files were usually binary files associated
with complex applications things  like databases
and such.

With the more modern file systems, maybe that
situation doesn't happen anymore.

Hey!  I think I found the terminology:  Sparce file.
Check out the entry on wikipedia.

But that may have nothing to do with your situation.






-----Original Message-----
From: aurfalien [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2012 12:02 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: File size diff on local disk vs NFS share

Hi all,

I never really paid attention to this but a file on an NFS mount is showing 64M in size, but when copying the file to a local drive, it shows 2.5MB in size.

My NFS server is hardware Raided with a volume stripe size of 128K were the volume size is 20TB, my local disk is about 500GB.

Is this due to my stripe size?

Nuggets are appreciated.

- aurf