Compressed NTFS image

Nefarious

Nefarious

Nefarious

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I'm making an image of my old laptop drive, as I need to access some of the data still. I've hooked it up to my linux server but want to store a compressed image then mount it so I can then access it over samba.

I'm currently using partimage (I know their support of NTFS is experimental) with bzip2 compression and believe that I can then mount the compressed image (is this correct???). Can anyone suggest a better way?
 
Your proposal sounds like a pretty stupid idea to me, riddled with potential trouble.

By far and away the easiest way to do this is to connect the two machines up, and copy & paste all of your data onto the server. Compress this, or whatever else as desired, and share this new folder with Samba.
If you need an image of the laptop drive to restore at a later date, keep this 110% separate. May take up a little more drivespace, but it's the only sensible way.

-Leezer-
 
I tend to image drives using dd, then gzip them. I haven't worked out how to mount the image without unzipping it yet, these forums suggested piping mount through gzip but I didn't manage to get this working. When it's uncompressed mount - o loop works fine on it.
 
JonJ678 said:
I tend to image drives using dd, then gzip them. I haven't worked out how to mount the image without unzipping it yet, these forums suggested piping mount through gzip but I didn't manage to get this working. When it's uncompressed mount - o loop works fine on it.
Click to expand...

Give FUSE a look, here's an example filesystem that allows transparent access to gzip files: http://www.nongnu.org/unpackfs/ I think you can use this kind of system so you have COMPRESSED ARCHIVE -> FUSE -> NTFS_IMAGE -> NTFS MOUNT (possibly, but its late and ive had beer)
 
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