Hi, this was discussed before in State of the zip-backend, and it seems that no work has been done to merge this into main. Is there simply not interest, or what's the reason?
I think being able to use zip files as a read-only backend (possibly with another abstraction layer, like the union backend) would open a great many possibilities.
welcome to the forum,
can use rclone mount --read-only and 7zip, tar or whatever tool.
I know that already, maybe I should be more specific in the example use case I had in mind.
(It might be out of scope for rclone, but I'm not sure)
Let's say you have an indie game that you download as a zip of game files, normally you would unzip it and then the game would save the saves into the folder.
My idea was to use an union mount with the read-only zip as lower read backend for game files and the saves would then be saved to a write directory.
Another idea was to have some website prototypes in zip files on disk and using rclone serve http to serve them under e.g. http://localhost:8080/project1.zip/some/path/in/project
IMO it is very weak use case.. Only reason seems to be saving few GB of local storage - which in 2024(5) is usually not an issue - 1TB external SSD is less than $50.
Especially that compress remote exist already.