[Gllug] Loopback mountable image file compression.

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

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.
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug