Wrong free space reported when using sparse settings

[Kayot]

Wrong free space reported when using sparse settings.

TC reports the free space on the drive before taking sparse files into account. I have a drive with a ton of sparse files on it, where file properties shows that the file is much smaller on disk than in the file system. TC however reports the free space as if the files were not sparsed.

TC also seems to report disk based compressed files as being full size in the free space count. Still testing this one.

[MVV]

Does Windows Explorer report correct size? (in drive properties)

[Kayot]

Yes, that's what I'm comparing it too. I have a difference of 14GB from what TC is telling me to what the properties dialog says. When I clear away all the compressed and sparsed files it becomes close to even.

I did have 300GB of files that when parsed were 200GB but I've moved them to a backup drive since last night.

Here's a comparison chart set:
Can't post link... Sorry...

[ghisler(Author)]

Total Commander uses GetDiskFreeSpaceEx, see:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa364937%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

There are two values for free space:
1. Free space available to the user, may be limited by quota
2. The total number of free bytes on a disk.

Total Commander displays the first value because it's the relevant one when copying to a disk.

Maybe you just calculate differently? Is one value shown in bytes and one in Gigabytes? You have to use a factor of 1024 instead of 1000 in both TC and Explorer:
1k = 1024b
1M = 1024k
1G = 1024M
I'm not talking about ISO standards here, just what TC and Explorer display.

[blind12]

Version 7.50 ignores sparse properties and reports incorrect inflated size for disk space occupied. With sparse files it can easily be 10 GB instead of 10 MB. Compressed files' disk space is reported correctly. Is 7.56 different in any way?

[ghisler(Author)]

Sorry, sparse files aren't currently supported. I tried to set the sparse attribute before or after copying, but it had no effect. Also CopyFileEx doesn't seem to support sparse files either.

[Flint]

I tried to set the sparse attribute before or after copying, but it had no effect.

Sparse attribute itself does not cause zero-filled areas to not be written. It just flags the possibility of doing so, but for actual excluding zero-filled areas you neet to explicitly call DeviceIOControl(FSCTL_SET_ZERO_DATA) on the target file.

[MVV]

Easiest way to copy sparse files - to create empty file, set attribute and size, and then copy only thoose blocks that contain data (by enumerating them).

[Flint]

MVV
Did you check it? Will setting size on a sparse file really make it zero-filled, and not just allocate disk space with all garbage it contains, like for usual files?

[blind12]

Far manager forum has this example:

fsutil file createnew test.dat 1000000000
fsutil sparse setflag test.dat
fsutil sparse setrange test.dat 0 1000000000