Whenever a file is copied, moved, or archived using commands that preserve extent attributes, there is the possibility of losing the attributes.
Such a failure might occur for one of the following reasons:
The file system receiving a copied, moved, or restored file from an archive is not a VxFS file system. Since other file system types do not support the extent attributes of the VxFS file system, the attributes of the source file are lost during the migration.
The file system receiving a copied, moved, or restored file is a VxFS type but does not have enough free space to satisfy the extent attributes. For example, consider a 50 KB file and a reservation of 1 MB. If the target file system has 500 KB free, it could easily hold the file but fail to satisfy the reservation.
The file system receiving a copied, moved, or restored file from an archive is a VxFS type but the different block sizes of the source and target file system make extent attributes impossible to maintain. For example, consider a source file system of block size 1024, a target file system of block size 4096, and a file that has a fixed extent size of 3 blocks (3072 bytes). This fixed extent size adapts to the source file system but cannot translate onto the target file system.
The same source and target file systems in the preceding example with a file carrying a fixed extent size of 4 could preserve the attribute; a 4 block (4096 byte) extent on the source file system would translate into a 1 block extent on the target.
On a system with mixed block sizes, a copy, move, or restoration operation may or may not succeed in preserving attributes. It is recommended that the same block size be used for all file systems on a given system.