Thursday, June 16, 2016

Checking whether a file is sparse in Windows

Windows has a concept of sparse files, which are expected to be mostly zeros and therefore have special handling in NTFS. Only sectors with data in them are written to disk, the rest show up as zeros when read but take no disk space.

If you're interested in seeing whether a certain file is sparse, you can use the fsutil utility:

fsutil sparse queryflag C:\path\to\file.ext

No comments:

Post a Comment