how do I make a compressed iso

[lancebermudez]

I want to use linux to image a windows hard drive and save the .iso to a dvd disk how do I do that? windows hard dive is 200gb my dvd is 4.1gb. Remastersys has compresstion for the iso but dont want a copy of the live cd along with the windows image. If I use the dd if=/dev/hda of=/tmp/hardrive.iso bs=1024 command the image is to large for the dvd. someone told me i could try

mkisofs -V LABEL -r DIRECTORY | gzip > cdrom.iso.gz—creates a compressed ISO for easy backup (replace the italicized sections with your CD label and directory, of course)

but i just want to be able to put in the cd and use the live cd with
dd if=/CDROM/hardrive.iso of=/dev/hda
to restore the image

Someone else told me to try a CramFs but they nor I know know how to make one.

[sgosnell]

There is no way you can get 200GB on a DVD. It's simply not possible to do that much compression. Getting 2:1 compression is difficult at best, and that doesn't often happen. If you can get the Windows drive use down to maybe 6GB, you could maybe get it compressed, but even that's iffy.

[TaZMAniac]

You would need at least 30-40 DVDs and a program that will span your hard drive image across all of them. You would also need at least another 200 Gb's of free drive space for the software to place the temp files and archive file while it's backing up the drive.

200 Gb's on one DVD isn't going to happen.

[Kloschüssel]

1] I would not backup the OS
2] I would backup only the data I want to backup and that is important to me (which definitely is not the OS)
3] strip out movies and audio files and such
4] don't recompress pictures (jpg) as they are already compressed and further compression makes the files become bigger again [if you want to know why read up how compression algorithms work]

Following these steps a normal user has not that much data at all (except for holiday pictures) and you should be able to store everything either on DVD (4gb), double layer (8gb) DVD or blu ray (25 or 50gb).

You shouldn't backup things on usb sticks - they're not suited for that purpose. I've wrecked 6 sticks in the past 2 years.

If you want to backup the whole drive just buy another 200gb drive and clone it using 'dd'.