As I mentioned in the title, I’m not looking to save space, I want to test something. In Windows, you could use this option on a folder and still access the contents and run executables while keeping the folder and it’s contents compressed. The benefit to doing this, outside of saving space, is that files could potentially be accessed faster on slower storage devices.
As I’ve been trying to get the most out of some old storage devices I have, I think that something like this would be a great option for this. The only problem is that I’ve tried looking online for a way to do this but search engines are terrible. So, I’m posting about this here in case someone knows of a way to do this.
Edit: I forgot to specify this but I’m trying this for gaming. I know it’s not recommended to this but as a result, I mostly need something that’s not read-only. It might work fine for some games but this obviously wont work for all games.
There’s an interesting project called DwarFS. I have it on my todolist to check it out but as I understand it you basically create a compressed read-only archive that is mountable and readable just like any other disk - https://github.com/mhx/dwarfs . Maybe this is something for your use case?
Maybe for some things but because I’m using it for games, the “read-only” might limit what games I can use this with. I might still try it out though.
Funnily enough it’s often used in the pirate scene to distribute games. But only as archives.
Unfortunately I haven’t tested it so I cannot fully advise on that but I have seen some “repacks” on the high seas where a whole wine prefix with a game already installed was compressed to a single
dwarwhich you can mount and play with configs and saves in your ~.I know it’s not advisable, I’m just a little crazy.