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I need to transfer all the data from an external hard drive through the internet, including its partition table, boot sector - everything -, but I don't have space anywhere to copy that entire hard drive into an image file to do that.

Plus, the person to whom I'm transferring is a Windows user, and the way he wants me to transfer, for our ease, is to make a torrent out of it, using Deluge (I'll run it on Wine). This makes things easier as we'll both be able to stop, resume and change networks all we want.

But it can't open a block device file as if it were a normal file, so I need some way to make it accessible like a regular file.

There's the project diskfile, but it doesn't work on my Linux (Mint Tricia 19.3). It compiles and it seemingly runs, but all it does is to mount something in the mountpoint without creating any of the files it should inside it, plus it's 9 years old already.

Is there currently any feasible alternative to do this?

Because for the rest it seems that I'd need to resort to much more difficult alternatives, specially considering he is a windows user and that this upload will take many hours in a way or the other.

And this isn't the first time I'm faced with a similar problem, where I want to access a block device file with software that can only possibly open a regular file, like any software running on Wine.

user2934303
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1 Answers1

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bindfs implements a FUSE-based pass-through "filesystem" (mirroring an existing location's contents much like the in-kernel mount --bind does) and has the option --block-devices-as-files to rewrite the file type seen by programs. (There are really no other functional differences except for the 'type' field.)

bindfs --block-devices-as-files /dev /notdev
grawity
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