ext2 fs issues when copying between disks

["Noah L. Meyerhans" <frodo@morgul.net>]

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I just moved /usr/ to a new partition.  Everything went smoothly, and the
new /usr is mounted.  However, disk usage is dramatically higher on the
new /usr than on the old one.  I have confirmed (using 'find . -xtype f
- -exec cmp {} /mnt/tmp/{} \;') that the directory structures are identical
between the two filesystems.  However, the files on the new filesystem are
bigger.  Here's what I mean:

ant:~$ df /usr /mnt/tmp 
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda10             1512832    688712    747272  48% /usr
/dev/sda11             2734835    595615   1997808  23% /mnt/tmp

Notice that the 'Used' column is greater on /usr than on /mnt/tmp (old
usr).  Doing something like du -sk /usr/sbin and du -sk /mnt/tmp/sbin
shows that the contents of the sbin subdirectory are slightly larger on
the new /usr...that's the case with all the subdirectories.

I suspect this problem has something to do with 'sparse files'.  The
command I used to copy the filesystem was:

cd /usr && tar cpf - . --exclude local --exclude lost+found | (cd
/mnt/tmp/ && tar xpf -)

However, I saw the exact same behavior in an earlier attempt using 
'cp -ax'

Has anybody got any idea why this new filesystem is "bigger" than the
orginal?  What can I do to fix it?

TIA!
noah

  PGP Public Key available at http://www.morgul.net/~frodo/mail.html 
  or by `finger -l frodo@morgul.net` 


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