[DatHebIkWeer]

I am not really sure if this is a bug report or a new feature request.

If I check “Create new part files as 'sparse' (NTFS only)” in the extended preferences, the program does just that. This works (as far as I see) perfectly. It is a great feature and saves me lots and lots of disk space.

There I is also the tool to import part files. That tool allows me to import part files that for one or another reason I cannot directly access in eMule. This works great also and has even helped me save some downloads that gave an “unknown file error” somewhere in the download progress. This happened once with a 46 GB file that had about 13 GB downloaded. Idk why it happened but I guess it was too fragmented by being large and created sparse and then written to disk in small chunks. I wouldn’t be surprised if large files have 33000 fragments (or 300,000) easily on my disk. Anyway this all works excellent except for one tiny thing.

The newly imported file is not created sparse.

Obviously this uses up a lot of disk space needlessly if it happens. But it also blocks a lot of possibilities for the import tool. For instance I would love to migrate my temp directory to a new faster bigger external hdd, but the files in it are (if non sparse) too big to fit on a larger disk. I have to migrate with sparse files, which seems not possible now.
Even if there is a quick and easy external way to accomplish this example I still think imported files should be saved sparse in this case.

Now the bug here is of course that the file is not created sparse on import even though the setting is set to sparse.

[xilolee]

I think that the sparse flag is lost when a file is copied (instead of moved).
In this case, you can change the sparse flag of your file from command prompt, with:

fsutil sparse setflag "xxx.part"

This post has been edited by xilolee: 07 July 2012 - 10:01 AM

[DatHebIkWeer]

xilolee, on 07 July 2012 - 11:00 AM, said:

fsutil sparse setflag "xxx.part"

I will write that one down. Thanks. Does the system know which parts to cut out of the file? Or are the empty parts just not in it?

Anyway for me personally this reduces the urgency a bit but I still think eMule should be able to do it.

This post has been edited by DatHebIkWeer: 07 July 2012 - 03:39 PM

[xilolee]

IMHO, MicroSoft should improve the sparse system:
1) when copying a file, it shouldn't lost the sparse flag;
2) the fsutil application should accept wildcard characters
3) the fsutil application should have an unsetflag option

(Anyway i'm using xp, maybe is it different for vista and seven?)

This post has been edited by xilolee: 08 July 2012 - 08:00 AM

[DatHebIkWeer]

It's not different in seven.

xilolee, on 07 July 2012 - 11:00 AM, said:

fsutil sparse setflag "xxx.part"

This didn't work. It may have set the flag to sparse, but it did not disallocate the disk space. So it's a Microsoft Special.
I did a bit of research and a copy operation is not really complicated. I can write a short program myself to do it. If I get to it you will hear it.