basic dd | gzip question

[JonJ678]

Hey guys. Whether its archaic or not, I use dd to backup partitions. For preferance I pipe it through gzip, so using a command themed on

dd if=/dev/sda1 sync=conv,noerror | gzip -c > /mnt/disk/sda1.img.gz

Which works well. But I cant mount it without extracting it first, and this is inconvenient. It leads to making backups just using dd, which I mount using -o loop. This is also inconvenient.

So is there a way of copying the partition, using compression, and mounting the file later on if I need to add files to or remove them from it?

Perhaps I'm just being thick, but I don't seem to get it. Something along the lines of gzip | mount perhaps

I hope the above makes sense, I'm evidently not very good with linux yet.

 

[tntcoder]

I would go down the route of using a virtual file system, i.e FUSE.

Just had a quick look, and theres a fair few projects which use FUSE to allow mounting of gzip'ed files, so you can mount and trasparently read/write to the backup transparently without worrying about the compression.

The project I found is called AVFS, see here: http://avf.sourceforge.net/

Heres a list of lots of FUSE projects related to virtually mounting archive formats: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/fuse/index.php?title=ArchiveFileSystems

Sure there is something there that can do what you want.

EDIT: the official fuse.gunzip looks good as well: http://fuse.gunzip.silverice.org/

 

[dangerstat]

Hey guys. Whether its archaic or not, I use dd to backup partitions. For preferance I pipe it through gzip, so using a command themed on

dd if=/dev/sda1 sync=conv,noerror | gzip -c > /mnt/disk/sda1.img.gz

Which works well. But I cant mount it without extracting it first, and this is inconvenient. It leads to making backups just using dd, which I mount using -o loop. This is also inconvenient.

So is there a way of copying the partition, using compression, and mounting the file later on if I need to add files to or remove them from it?

Perhaps I'm just being thick, but I don't seem to get it. Something along the lines of gzip | mount perhaps

I hope the above makes sense, I'm evidently not very good with linux yet.

Erm I don't quite get what you want. If you gzip the output of dd, and then want to mount it, you'd use gunzip -c <gzipped iso> then a mount command

 

[JonJ678]

Oh. gunzip -c file.img.gz mount ... or gunzip -c file.img.gz | mount?

That might need to be a different letter than c, but I think I get the idea. Is the pipe needed?

Fuze is a good idea but altogether more complicated than what I'm looking for, going for the bare minimum here on the basis that it's the simplist tools that break last