tldr/pages/common/virt-sparsify.md

virt-sparsify

Make virtual machine drive images thin-provisioned. NOTE: Use only for offline machines to avoid data corruption. More information: https://libguestfs.org.

• Create a sparsified compressed image without snapshots from an unsparsified one:

virt-sparsify --compress {{path/to/image.qcow2}} {{path/to/image_new.qcow2}}

• Sparsify an image in-place:

virt-sparsify --in-place {{path/to/image.img}}