Sparse files are nice to use to store virtual machine’s virtual disks but can be a real pain in the ass to backup efficiently, especially over the network. Luckily rsync provides a way to intelligently copy sparse files both locally and over the network. The trick is use --sparse and --inplace options. Let’s say we have a sparse 60 GB qemu virtual disk with only around 7 GB used: $ ls -lh fedora24.qcow2 -rw------- 1 root root 61G Nov 8 19:11 fedora24.qcow2 $ du -h fedora24.qcow2 7.2G fedora24.qcow2 The first thing to note is that ls does not recognize sparse files while du does. The first time a file is copied use the --sparse option: …