/tags/qcow2/Recent content in Qcow2 on LifeHugoen-usMon, 13 Jan 2014 18:36:00 +0530/post/2014/2014-01-13-shrink-vms-on-virt-manager-kvm/Mon, 13 Jan 2014 18:36:00 +0530/post/2014/2014-01-13-shrink-vms-on-virt-manager-kvm/<p>I use <code>rsync</code> to back up my workstation, including virtual machine disk images. Due to a known issue with sparse file handling during backups, <code>rsync</code> would expand sparse files, inflating an 11 GB disk image to its full 64 GB provisioned size on the backup server.</p> <p>To solve this, I converted the disk images to compressed <code>qcow2</code> format:</p> <h3 id="1-convert-existing-raw-images-to-qcow2">1. Convert Existing Raw Images to qcow2</h3> <p>This also enables live snapshot support in <code>virt-manager</code>:</p>