Mounting multiple ZIP files without requiring additional tools - eg. Google Takeout

[dagelf]

This project is ideal for mounting and selectively searching and extracting from large Google Takeout .zip's.

The problem with those is that they are usually split up into multiple files - and this tool could be immensely useful in situations where space is at a premium, without having to require additional layers like overlayfs or mergerfs and the like (although the latter might be a good quick-fix.)

This issue is to discuss the option and mechanism of expanding this tool so as to be able to mount multiple .zip files into the same path. This would also make it useful to explore incremental backups, if newer files were presented over older ones.

[fdegros]

mount-zip does not support multipart ZIPs. The reason is that the underlying libzip library does not support them. I asked the libzip's authors about it a while ago. My understanding was that there is very little demand for these multipart ZIPs.

[dagelf]

The Google Takeout zip's aren't multipart, so its just a matter of overlaying multiple zips onto the same mount point. But multipart zip support would also be convenient - and I suppose that the libzip authors won't reject a solid PR that adds support for those either, which I'm also willing to look at.

[fdegros]

The Google Takeout zip's aren't multipart, so its just a matter of overlaying multiple zips onto the same mount point.

I see.

How would that be specified on the command line?

[dagelf]

I'm not sure if its necessary to use a separate switch for the mount point, so for now I'm just going with:

<zip_file1> [<zip_file2> ... <zip_fileN>] <mount_point>

[fdegros]

Ok. It might be possible to implement this feature efficiently and neatly in mount-zip. Let's think about it. But it is not a high priority, especially since there are workarounds like overlayfs or mergerfs.

[christianscott]

I would also find this handy. True that this can also be achieved using {overlay,merger}fs (and that is what I plan to do) but it would be lovely to achieve this behaviour with a single command instead.

[fdegros]

If we want to implement this feature, then we probably need to think about file name collisions. At the moment, mount-zip deduplicates colliding file names. But this might not be the desired behavior when stacking up multiple archives in the same mount point.