On: Who Needs Git When You Got ZFS? (2013)

[khc]

Unless you want the space to be pre-allocated

[stevekemp → khc]

Yeah I've seen hosting companies in the past use sparse files for virtual machine storage - all is good unless, or until, they overcommit.

At which point you have filesystem-soup..

[anon4 → khc]

Yes, the better way is by using the fallocate program which uses the posix_fallocate syscall, which makes a new file with a given size containing whatever happened to be on disk at the time. Basically malloc for filesystems.