7Ağu
Encrypted LUKS fs inside a file: sparse or not?
I have a LUKS encrypted file filled with around 160GB of data that I use a lot. For safety, I created the file with 400GB. That is of course a lot of wasted space. So I switched to a sparse file, basically following the advice here, simply by creating the file with the seek option:
dd if=/dev/zero of=<file> bs=1G count=0 seek=400
But then I thought: what happens if the file begins to be fragmented? Usually this is not a problem since I don't have very big files, and when I do they are media files that usually don't change. But an encrypted thing that I use so frequently will probably get fragmented quite soon...
So my question is: is there any true downside on using a sparse file instead of a fixed sized file in my situation? Is fragmenting really an issue? Do you have any further advice?
