Just a curiousity... I'm nc-ing a disk image from a laptop, like: gzip </dev/sda | nc target 4242 and on the target computer: nc -l -p 4242 | gunzip | dd bs=4k conv=sparse of=laptop-xp.img and on the target computer I am also impatiently doing: du -sk --apparent-size laptop-xp.img && du -sk laptop-xp.img and the output is a bit strange. The two values obviously differ a bit, and I'd expect them to differ more once it hits the empty part of the disk, but I'm getting outputs like: # du -sk --apparent-size laptop-xp.img && du -sk laptop-xp.img 834016 laptop-xp.img 831992 laptop-xp.img # du -sk --apparent-size laptop-xp.img && du -sk laptop-xp.img 841088 laptop-xp.img 672500 laptop-xp.img # du -sk --apparent-size laptop-xp.img && du -sk laptop-xp.img 844224 laptop-xp.img 752876 laptop-xp.img # du -sk --apparent-size laptop-xp.img && du -sk laptop-xp.img 851168 laptop-xp.img 849144 laptop-xp.img # du -sk --apparent-size laptop-xp.img && du -sk laptop-xp.img 855200 laptop-xp.img 853176 laptop-xp.img The size reported by du actually goes down periodically then up again. What's with that? The filesystem is btrfs but I don't know that that's anything to do with it. Just curious... James