Tool to mount a zip/rar/* archive as a Win drive and be able to read/write as a normal device?

windows mount zip rar virtual-drive

29,583

Solution 1

Try Pismo File Mount. Its freeware, supports zip, and ISO, but not .rar

Solution 2

There are a few utilties out there that can do this, but I use this one:

Essentially, you can mount any supported type of archive (zip, rar, 7z, iso, etc), to any # of drives you want, and they act just like regular drive.

Quite useful:

Win Archive Virtual Drive

The image above shows drive K -> O; drive K is actually a mounted RAR file for a .NET project :)

29,583

caerolus

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

caerolus over 1 year

I'm looking for some tool that, given a zip/rar/tar/* archive file, mounts it as a new Windows drive. Some tools are WinMount or WinArchive, but I need one that allows me to write/create/delete files as well as read. That is, just as if it were a USB stick or something like that. The file doesn't need to be compressed, just archived is fine. Thanks a lot!
- caerolus over 12 years
  
  It doesn't need to be compressed, just archived is fine.
- caerolus over 12 years
  
  Yes! didn't know these were supported natively by Windows 7. The problem was having to synchronize tens of thousands of files between machines..so I figured having them in a single file would be easier. Thank you!
- caerolus over 12 years
  
  @Eroen Still, if there was a way of doing this with zip, rar, tar or whatever, it'd be great in terms of portability and ease of use.
- n611x007 over 7 years
  
  See unix.SE:168807 for a similar question for Linux.
- mirh almost 7 years
  
  @caerolus it would be an extreme PITA to use those compressed formats as "disk clones". Tarballs are already kind of better then, but since they lack indexing it's still sub-bar for this use-case.
Quonux about 7 years

doesn't seem to support write operations.
Glenn Slayden over 6 years

Apparently Prismo can mount 7zip only if it is LZMA? The 'WinArchiver' mentioned by @zackrspv on the other hand seems to support any 7z format (?).
Euri Pinhollow almost 6 years

@Quonux that would be almost impossible in general case. It's very hard to update archive contents without massive writing overhead other than to append new files.
Quonux almost 6 years

I would argue that it depends on the compressor and its format. It works fine under certain assumptions. One industry case where a online(chunked) compression works is in the Oracle database - oracle.com/technetwork/database/options/compression/…