Backing up to a .DMG File on Server

[Marco_Polo]

Originally Posted by dnanian

It's not at all unexpected for the image to grow larger then the total size of the files on the source. What's unusual (and, according to my tests, impossible) is to have the image grow larger than its set maximum size...

I used this command...

hdiutil imageinfo [/path_to/disk.img]

... to check the sparse image before I deleted it and started using the ordinary disk image for my backups.

It reported the correct amount of used and empty space as corresponded to the amount of used and empty space on the original drive and what was reported in the Finder when I mounted the sparse image, but the image file, itself, was still roughly 70GB larger than that.

I recall that there was a high "resize limit" of roughly 500GB on the image, but assumed that it only came into play if I used hdiutil to resize it from the command line.

Was I wrong in that assumption? Does that number represent the largest that the image can grow without user intervention? If so, then SD or the OS was setting the wrong number when it created the sparse image.