Support for sparseimages (not just sparsebundles)

[aurajamming]

When I attempt to load my sparseimage backup of my old macbook, sparsebundlefs doesn't seem to recognize it as containing anything:

root@cola-debian:/home/jim/software/sparsebundlefs# ./sparsebundlefs /media/mediadrive/public/MBP\ image.sparseimage /mnt -s -f -D
sparsebundlefs: initialized /media/mediadrive/public/MBP\ image.sparseimage, band size 0, total size 0

The sparseimage file is 157 GB - not empty :) It mounts fine in OS X 10.7.

What can I do to determine the error?

[laduke]

I'm having the same problem. I tried it on a sparebundle and it works fine. But it won't mount my sparseimage, which it probably isn't designed to do. I can't find anything else though :(

[torarnv]

Hmm, @jmeier, can you post the content of the plist file inside the sparsebundle?

[torarnv]

@laduke Does it report band size 0 for you as well?

[aurajamming]

I no longer have a working mac to access the image, so this information is from opening it in TransMac. Transmac shows that it contains an HFS+ volume, and in that volume's root directory I don't see an obvious plist file.

Note again that this is a sparseimage file, not a sparsebundle, which @laduke points out sparsebundlefs isn't likely to be built for at all. Are they likely to be similar enough to add the functionality?

Also, do you have any documentation on the formats? Apple doesn't seem to have documented them anywhere.

[torarnv]

Ah, I see. Sparseimages are not supported. Not sure how easy it would be support them, but I will have a look when I have some free cycles.

The sparsebundle format was reverse-engineered, so the code is probably as close to a documentation as you'll get.

[norpol]

Since this is still open, and people might still have trouble accessing their data, I'm dropping this workaround here.

I ended up using OSX-KVM. Best performance I could get was by:

• Setting up a http server (python3 -m http.server won't work, due lack of a http-feature, required by hdiutil, I chose lighttpd, because it has little dependencies)

• Attaching the image inside the OSX vm $ hdiutil attach http://host.invalid/image.sparseimage

• Copying from the OSX vm to my storage using:

Speed	Method
30 MB/s	HTTP attach + smb server running on osx + piping on linux from smb to > /dev/null
15 MB/s	HTTP attach + rsync to nfs share (probably disk io/network penalty)
02 MB/s	sshfs attach + rsync to sshfs

smb-way doesn't keep the permissions, but the modification dates should be preserved.

You can mount the OSX SMB share on Linux via. (requires cifs-utils package on Debian). Especially useful if you only need to access certain files quickly. sudo mount.cifs //osx-kvm/share /mnt/share -o user=admin,pass=

If you are completely lost, try pinging me.

[torarnv]

Thanks for the workaround @norpol!

[torarnv]

Added logic in 5df6fce to error out early if we detect that a sparseimage is opened. Sparse images are an entirely different format, so handling them in this project is unfortunately out of scope. Sorry 😢