On Ma, 24 mar 20, 19:12:46, Gene Heskett wrote:
And nothing so far, and I have been watching, in the way of reducing
a filesystem to only the actual size occupied. Then it can be backed
up with dd and recovered, rewritten by dd, at a reasonable size for
storage. And re-expanded to fit the media it finds.
You could do this with the 'sparse' option of dd (you might need to
fill the partition with a file containing only zeroes first).
The resulting file must be handled with care as many tools (cp, rsync)
will un-sparse it by default, as will writing it to a filesystem
without support for sparse files (tar it first).
To see the actual size with ls you will have to use -s/--size.
All of my attempts to do that with dd alone have been thwarted by
the fact that I have yet to find two u-sd's marked as such and such
a capacity, that actually were the same size.
Just create the partitions slightly smaller than the size of the SD
card.