Clarification on docs - multi-thread transfers creating sparse files on local disk (windows)

[Kelly_Trinh]

I was reading the documentation of ' --multi-thread-streams ' at Documentation and the info about whether the resulting file on windows is spares or not seems contradictory.

on third para you have:

On the local disk, rclone preallocates the file (using fallocate(FALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE) on unix or NTSetInformationFile on Windows both of which takes no time) then each thread writes directly into the file at the correct place. This means that rclone won't create fragmented or sparse files and there won't be any assembly time at the end of the transfer.

which seems to say that the files wont be sparse but at the end also have

NB on Windows using multi-thread transfers to the local disk will cause the resulting files to be sparse. Use --local-no-sparse to disable sparse files (which may cause long delays at the start of transfers) or disable multi-thread transfers with --multi-thread-streams 0

which seems to say resulting files will be sparse.

IS this a bug in the docs or do I misunderstand something?

[ncw (Nick Craig-Wood)]

I think this is a bug in the docs!

@Kelly_Trinh

On the local disk, rclone preallocates the file (using fallocate(FALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE) on unix or NTSetInformationFile on Windows both of which takes no time) then each thread writes directly into the file at the correct place.

OK so far

@Kelly_Trinh

This means that rclone won't create fragmented

The files will be fragmented

@Kelly_Trinh

or sparse files

But they won't be sparse (they won't have any gaps in).

@Kelly_Trinh

and there won't be any assembly time at the end of the transfer.

This is also correct.