Compression and storage?

[Frozeninreality]

Hi. Just curious about something. I use 2 harddrives...a main 500g and a backup 500g. I want to take the 500g backup and compress the hell out of it for both storage and security...but there are a few things I need to specify though.

1.) I need a program that will allow me to access the compressed archive.
2.) I need to be able to shrink about 390Gb to as small as I can.

I know Ghost can do that but Im wondering if there is a more user friendly option.

Can anyone advise the right software for me? Thanks!

 

[david8115]

7-zip, or winrar, winzip

 

[sub mesa]

Switch to an OS that has ZFS, which has transparant compression.

FreeNAS 0.7 should be able to, dunno how far they are with ZFS integration. But that means you need a second system acting as NAS. Though i guess you could run it inside a VM perfectly.

Thats a bit exotic though, certainly not standard practise.