On Thu, Aug 04, 2011 at 04:35:20PM +0200, Rainer Traut wrote: > I need to transfer a local raw image to another datacenter. > Is there a way to achieve good compression of this image, I heard of > tools overwriting unused space with zeros. Is this a good idea? You're talking about sparse files? You probably want to use rsync with --sparse to keep the file from inflating on the far side. Something like: rsync -ctrvlzSP source.raw user at destination:source.raw -- . ___ ___ . . ___ . \ / |\ |\ \ . _\_ /__ |-\ |-\ \__