[Gllug] Loopback mountable image file compression.

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I have a need to make and archive dd images of windows machines but
> naturally these are going to use a whole heap of space so I'd like to
> compress them. Wanting also to eat my cake it would be nice to be able
> to mount them as loopback devices without uncompressing the entire
> volume first so straight ahead gzip and other stream compression progs
> are out. I'm therefore wondering what block compression I could use:
> cloop, squashfs or something else I've not heard of. It would need to
> handle very large files, possibly multi terrabyte. Can anyone offer some
> advice as to which might be best for speed / compression / capacity /
> reliability etc.
>
> Also related, are there any CLI based imaging tools that are available
> in the stock Ubuntu repos which can synthesize a compacted image of an
> NTFS or EXT2/EXT3 partition based on the blocks/sectors actually used by
> that filesystem, as opposed to simply copying every block in the
> partition whether or not it is used by the filesystem? Note, this would
> have to have a CLI as I would need it to be scriptable and ideally it
> would be in the standard Ubuntu repos (Standard, Universe or Multiverse)
> to spare me the hassle of manually maintaining it.
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Roger.
>   

P.S. It would be doubly handy if above block compression was also
available on Open Solaris (or maybe Nexenta!?)

:)

Roger.
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