I use Paragon Hard Disk Manager or their free Backup and Recovery tool:

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/

I think EaseUS ToDo Backup (free) also does this:

http://www.easeus.com/backup-software/tb-free.html

VHD files might be the solution, but I don't know that they support compression.

VHDs can be mounted in Windows 7 and up through computer management (Right click "Disk Management" and select "Attach VHD"), and can also be mounted in Linux with the virtualbox-fuse package.

There's a Sysinternals tool (Disk2VHD) to create a VHD image from a physical disk.

The upshot of VHD is that you could potentially boot the system in a VM if you felt the urge! 😜

Windows 7 doesn't want to mount disk-compressed VHDs though

leileilol wrote:

Windows 7 doesn't want to mount disk-compressed VHDs though

I didn't even know you could have compressed VHDs. 😜

Personally I use a compressed VHD through VirtualPC mounting it through some basic Win98+VPCAdditions install to access it, especially due to some crazy partition table corruption crap that made the drives unusable for 2000 and beyond some decade ago. and since I only really care about the retrieving part, Undo disks are enabled 😀

I decided to move my XP 64 installation over to my 1TB drive alongside my Linux install, so this is kind of a moot question for me now, since I can easily keep my old drive in here.

Anyway, I had considered going the VHD route at one point, but when I considered the disk space requirements and the lack of compression, it just wasn't going to happen. I also considered making a compressed backup with Clonezilla, but I would only be able to mount it in Linux, and I would have to have even more disk space set aside just to decompress the image. I'd be using less space in the first place to have a decompressed image that I could mount, than a compressed image along with space set aside to decompress it.

They don't really have any solutions designed for people with hundreds of gigs of disorganized data. I remember going through oodles of duplicate files just to cut down on the amount of space it would take for me to make a Driveimage XML backup. And the amount of time it took just to do a backup with Driveimage XML... I'd be able to do half a dozen backups with Clonezilla in that time, maybe more.

leileilol wrote:

Personally I use a compressed VHD through VirtualPC mounting it through some basic Win98+VPCAdditions install to access it, especially due to some crazy partition table corruption crap that made the drives unusable for 2000 and beyond some decade ago. and since I only really care about the retrieving part, Undo disks are enabled 😀

How do you deal with NTFS volumes then?

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

They don't really have any solutions designed for people with hundreds of gigs of disorganized data. I remember going through oodles of duplicate files just to cut down on the amount of space it would take for me to make a Driveimage XML backup. And the amount of time it took just to do a backup with Driveimage XML... I'd be able to do half a dozen backups with Clonezilla in that time, maybe more.

What did you use for the duplicate files? I found Duplicate File Hard Linker (DFHL) to be useful, you let it run on your partition (or selected subdirectories) and it does exactly what it says: When it finds two duplicate files it removes one of them and replaces it with a hard link, nothing is lost but space is hopefully recovered. Of course there are other utilities to do this, see eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_duplicate_file_finders

I use Acronis True Image, there a "light" version free from WD if you own a WD drive, called "Acronis True Image WD Edition"
You can create compressed images and mount them to browse on a pc where it is installed.
You can also create a bootable cd to restore images from external devices.

For the program to start you need to have a WD drive connected, but even connecting an external USB WD is enough.
It's no problem for me since all my windows pc's have WD drives anyway