SquashFS: Mountable compressed read-only filesystem

Tuesday, June 9th, 2015

SquashFS is generally used for LiveCDs or embedded devices to store a compressed read-only version of a file system. This saves space at the expense of slightly slower access times from the media. There’s another use for SquashFS: keeping an easily accessible compressed mounted image available. This is particularly useful for archival purposes such as keeping a full copy of an old server or directory around.

Usage is quite easy under Debian-derived systems. First we install the squashfs-tools package

$ sudo apt-get install squashfs-tools

Create an compressed version of a directory:

$ sudo mksquashfs /home/fboender/old-server_20150608/ old-server_20150608.sqsh

Remove the original archive:

$ sudo rm -rf /home/fboender/old-server_20150608

Finally, mount the compressed archive:

$ sudo mkdir /home/fboender/old-server_2015060
$ sudo mount -t squashfs -o loop old-server_20150608.sqsh /home/fboender/old-server_2015060

Now you can directly access files in the compressed archive:

$ sudo ls /home/fboender/old-server_2015060
home/
usr/
etc/
...

The space savings are considerable too.

$ sudo du -b -s /home/fboender/old-server_2015060
17329519042	/home/fboender/old-server_2015060
$ sudo ls -l old-server_20150608.sqsh
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1530535936 Jun  8 12:45

17 Gb for the full uncompressed archive versus only 1.5 Gb for the compressed archive. We just saved 15.5 Gb of diskspace. .

 Optionally, you may want to have it mounted automatically at boottime:

$ sudo vi /etc/fstab
/home/fboender/old-server_20150608.sqsh   /home/fboender/old-server_2015060        squashfs        ro,loop 0       0

If the server starts up, the archive directory will be automatically mounted.