I love to make backups with Clonezilla. But often, I'll back up my system, wipe my Linux partition and try another distro—only to realize that I need access to just one file from the old installation. For example, maybe I made an interesting change to my .zshrc
or Samba configuration, which I want to re-use on the new system.
The obvious solutions aren't my favorites. It's easy to restore an image to a spare disk, but it takes a long time, and requires a spare disk I'm willing to wipe. I [could extract an entire image][extract_image], but that also takes lots of time and space. Wouldn't it be nice to just look inside my compressed Clonezilla image, just like I can do with a zip file or squashfs archive?
It turns out it's possible, with clever use of [user-space filesystems][fuse]!