I'm looking for a file type for storing archives of systems that have been decomissioned. At the moment, we primarily use tar.gz, but finding and extracting just a few files from a 200GB tar.gz archive is unwieldy, since tar.gz doesn't support any sort of random-access read provision. (And before you get the idea, mounting a tgz using FUSE doen't make it better.)
Here's what we've found so far -- I'd like to know what other options there are:
I'm trying to think of a simple way of creating a full-featured filesystem image into as small a space as possible -- ext2 in a cloop image, but it doesn't seem like a particularly user-friendly solution.
Presumably this problem has been solved before -- are there any options I've missed?
virt-sparsify can be used to sparsify and (through qemu's qcow2 gzip support) compress almost any linux filesystem or disk image. The resulting images can be mounted in a VM, or on the host through guestmount.
There's a new ndbkit xz plugin that can be used for higher compression, which still keeps good random-access performance (as long as you ask xz/pixz to reset compression on block boundaries).