# Speeding up vagrant box add

**URL:** <https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/speeding-up-vagrant-box-add/61423>\
**Category:** Vagrant\
**Created:** [January 5, 2024, 5:01am UTC](https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/speeding-up-vagrant-box-add/61423 "2024-01-05T05:01:48Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![c\_a\_r\_l\_o\_s](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/hashicorp/user_avatar/discuss.hashicorp.com/c_a_r_l_o_s/32/39655_2.png) [@c\_a\_r\_l\_o\_s](https://discuss.hashicorp.com/u/c_a_r_l_o_s)\
**Post date:** [January 5, 2024, 5:01am UTC](https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/speeding-up-vagrant-box-add/61423/1 "2024-01-05T05:01:48Z")

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Hello, I noticed today that while importing a newly created box file from packer into vagrant, vagrant seems to be copying the entire box file to a tmp file on the same disk, and then unpacking that box file. This template is ~20GB in size, so this takes quite a bit of time and also required that we have 40GB disk space available to store 2 copies of the box file, and then another 30GB for the extracted box. I am trying to optimize our packer build process and this seems like low hanging fruit.

Two questions come out of this:

1. Is there any way to prevent vagrant from copying the box file before extracting it?
2. This machine has an additional 10GB disk, which vagrant seems to be thick-provisioning on disk. Is there a way to have vagrant thin-provision the disk, which should again save us some time?

This was seen on vagrant 2.2.19 and 2.4.0 on Windows.

Thanks!

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![c\_a\_r\_l\_o\_s](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/hashicorp/user_avatar/discuss.hashicorp.com/c_a_r_l_o_s/32/39655_2.png) [@c\_a\_r\_l\_o\_s](https://discuss.hashicorp.com/u/c_a_r_l_o_s)\
**Post date:** [January 16, 2024, 7:39am UTC](https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/speeding-up-vagrant-box-add/61423/2 "2024-01-16T07:39:15Z")

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bump. Is this behavior by design?