183 GB of virtual hard drives compressed to 16 GB

[jimspoon]

I have a bunch of old hard drives, most backed up in different ways (Acronis TIB files, Macrium Reflect mrimg files, and file-by-file backups). I want to be able to find files on the backups, deduplicate the backups to save hard drive space.

Since TIB and MRIMG files are proprietary, I thought about converting them to VHD or VHDX files. And I know that VHD support (maybe VHDX too?) is in the works for Everything. When I did try a conversion a while back, I found that the VHD file was much larger than the TIB or MRIMG file I converted, so I put that project aside for awhile.

But today I did see an interesting post by a guy who found a way to shrink 183GB of VMs down to 16GB. If I could duplicate that kind of results, perhaps VHD/VHDX might once again become a viable way to backup old drives and make them accessible via Everything (if and when VHD/X support arrives).

I will note that his method made use of Windows Server 2012 disk deduplication so I don't know if such a deduplicated VHDX could even be used on a non-server Windows.

Here is the link:

Beyond Zip - How to store 183 GB of VMs in a 16 GB file using PowerShell - Deployment Research-https://www.deploymentresearch.com/beyo ... owershell/

[horst.epp]

I use Kopia as backup tool which includes deduplication.
Backups can be stored locally or on the cloud, I use 1und1 per WebDAV.
Backups can be mounted as Virtual drive so you can make a folder index in Everything.
https://kopia.io/

[jimspoon]

Very very interesting, I had never heard of Kopia. Amazing that it's open source.