> I like supporting wasteful obsolete features when they don't get
> in the way of anything else.
Not everybody thinks sparse files are an obsolete feature.
Quoting from Microsoft Systems Journal Nov 1997, page 19:
"Other cool new features in NTFS 5 are sparse files and file
encryption. [...] Sparse files are a way for a program to
create huge files [...] without actually committing disk
space for every byte. [...] For example, you may need a file that
is 42 GB in size, but you only actually write data to the first
64 KB and last 64 KB. Using sparse files, NTFS will only
allocate physical disk space to the portions of the file that
you write to."
Just an observation.
By the way, the article also describes a lot of new features
in NT 5.0 which sound very familiar, like "Reparse points",
which is something like symlinks on steroids, disk quotas,
ReadFileScatter, WriteFileGather, etc...
-- Johan Myreen jem@iki.fi
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