Moving ~/.colima (or any VM sparse disk) to an HFS+ external drive inflates it to full size
Archive instead of copying, or format the external drive as APFS:
cd ~ && tar -czf /Volumes/Ext/colima.tar.gz .colima # compressed, holes compress to nothing
# restore later (needs free space for the real data size)
cd ~ && tar -xzf /Volumes/Ext/colima.tar.gz
Check the destination format first: diskutil info /Volumes/Ext | grep 'File System Personality'.
Symptom
Offloading ~/.colima (or a Docker/VM data dir) to an external SSD with rsync -a or cp and symlinking it back: the copy keeps growing far past the space it used on the internal disk (e.g. 33 GB and climbing for a 100 GB virtual disk that was ~11 GB on APFS).
Cause
The VM's datadisk is a sparse file. APFS stores it sparsely, but HFS+ has no sparse-file support, so every hole is written out as zeros on the destination. (rsync -S cannot help — the destination filesystem can't represent holes.)
Verify
The archive was ~5 GB for an 11 GB real disk; restored VM boots.
Notes
macOS's bundled openrsync also failed with --remove-source-files to that drive; verify copies with cmp and delete separately.
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