alfamari - 2025-02-12

Hello! First time user and so far very impressed.
I have created a backup of a drive with the default settings which uses gzip compression. I noticed later the warnings regarding using the file browsing feature on gzip/bzip2 compressed files over 10gb and the recommendation to use an uncompressed format for it. I'd like to use the file browser to visually confirm the integrity of the files and may potentially want to retrieve individual files from it in the future. However, I'd still like to keep it compressed for real storage.

So what I'd like to be able to do is to gunzip it, view the files in the explorer, and then recompress it with zstd instead. Then verify the image integrity at the end to make sure everything is ok after the conversions.

I'm not sure exactly how rescuezilla is expecting its file structure to be or if there is a config file that tells it what it should be expecting. Or any other potential problems I'm missing, not thinking about, or haven't forseen.

As this is a fresh backup and I am not going to wipe the original drive until I've ironed these out, I have the luxury to experiment with a process such as tampering with an image backup that would otherwise probably not be recommended.

As a final, probably safer and easier solution, I suppose the best option would be to delete the gzip backup, recreate an uncompressed image and then just put the entire folder structure in a .tar.zstd or a .7z with a different computer that has it. Then uncompressing it myself for future operations. Would this be a good solution?

Also, how feasible would it be to use the explorer on zstd compressed images of over 200gb or over 1tb. While I noticed the recommendation to use uncompressed for this feature, I couldn't help but also notice how zstd was not listed alongside the warning about gzip/bzip2.